Pollinator Pathmaker is an artwork for pollinators, planted and cared for by humans. Created by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg in response to human-made ecological damage, the work is a one-of-a-kind experiment in interspecies art. 

Bees, butterflies, moths, wasps, beetles, and other pollinators are essential for many plants to reproduce and our ecosystems to flourish. But human-made habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species, and climate change are triggering a terrifying decline in their populations. In response, Ginsberg devised an algorithmic tool that designs planting for pollinators’ tastes, not human taste. Working with horticulturalists, leading pollinator experts, and an AI scientist, Ginsberg created this tool to design with empathy for other species. The result is an unlimited edition of algorithmically-generated living artworks.

If pollinators designed gardens, what would humans see?

Insect pollinators experience the world differently from humans. They see colors differently from us, forage in different ways, and emerge in different seasons to each other. As a result, a garden designed for them may look quite different from a garden created for us. 

Many plants need pollinators to help them reproduce, so they have evolved colors, patterns, shapes, scents, and delicious nectar to lure go-betweens to their pollen and transport it to other flowers of the same type. Co-evolution means that pollinators have evolved to suit the anatomy and seasons of specific flowers, and flowers have evolved to suit features of specific pollinators. 

Pollinator species also have different foraging styles. Beetles explore patches more randomly, while bees and some other insects remember the locations of the flowers they visit, zapping along the most efficient flight paths, or ‘traplines.’ Since a bee may visit 10,000 flowers in a day, finding the fastest route between them is essential. 

The loss of a single species of pollinator can mean the end of a plant species. Given all the many ways that plants and their pollinators co-exist, creating planting that maximizes pollinator diversity is not only vital, it’s also a complex challenge.

To encode a human emotion like empathy into an algorithm, Ginsberg defined empathy as designing planting that supports as many pollinator species as possible. The Pollinator Pathmaker algorithm selects and arranges plants to suit the different preferences of their different visitors. Since the algorithm is made by humans, it can’t completely remove human biases such as taste. But an algorithm can help to dull the effect of these choices and design for other species, rather than us. 

The algorithm chooses plants from regional ‘Plant Palettes,’ developed by the artist with horticulturalists, pollinator experts, and by using published research and guides to pollinator-friendly plants. 

Pollinator Pathmaker is based on a model of generosity: each commission of an international Edition includes curating a new regional Plant Palette that is added to use on pollinator.art. The public can use the platform to generate their own DIY Editions of Pollinator Pathmaker for free; by inputting where their garden is, how big it is, and its soil and light conditions, they can play with the algorithm’s empathy tools and create a unique planting design of their own. Gardens are not isolated spaces and here are reframed as interconnected networks across living landscapes.

Ginsberg’s aim is to create the world’s largest climate-positive artwork; this ambition relies on collaboration. Transforming us from consumers to caretakers of art, together, we can use art to create agency in this time of ecological crisis.

The first two Pollinator Pathmaker Editions opened in 2022; a 55 m permanent installation at the Eden Project, Cornwall, and eleven meandering beds over 250 m in Kensington Gardens, London, commissioned by the Serpentine. The next has been planted with LAS Art Foundation, Berlin, Germany, opening in June 2023.

Links: https://pollinator.art/

Artist: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg 
Algorithm Developer: Dr Przemek Witaszczyk 
Visual identity: Studio Frith 
Sound design: Nick Ryan 
Designer and Researcher: Iman Datoo 
Horticulture: Colin Skelly 
Producers: Hannah Andrews, Ruby Dixon, Cecilie Gravesen 
Studio managers: Freire Barnes, Emily Sofaly 

Pollinator Pathmaker Eden Project Edition, 2021 
Commissioned by the Eden Project and funded by Garfield Weston Foundation 
Additional founding supporters: Gaia Art Foundation 

Collaborators: Google Arts & Culture 

Curators: Misha Curson, Céline Holman, and Hannah Hooks 
With thanks to the whole Eden team and PR, Nicola Jeffs 

Pollinator Pathmaker Serpentine Edition, 2022 
Commissioned by Eden Project and Serpentine 
With support from Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation and Google Arts & Culture 

Curators Rebecca Lewin, and Sarah Hamed. 
With thanks to the whole Serpentine team and The Royal Parks 

Pollinator Pathmaker LAS Edition, 2023 
Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation 

With thanks to Dr Bettina Kames, Kristina Leipold, Curators Sophie Korschildgen and Carly Whitefield, Alexis Convento, and the whole LAS team, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, and Königliche Gartenakademie 

Originally commissioned by the Eden Project and funded by Garfield Weston Foundation. 

Additional founding supporters: Gaia Art Foundation 

Collaborators: Google Arts & Culture.  

The International Edition Founding Commissioners are LAS Art Foundation.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (GB) is a multidisciplinary artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Daisy’s work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, conservation, biodiversity, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the world.

Ginsberg spent over ten years experimentally engaging with the field of synthetic biology, developing new roles for artists and designers. She is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology ’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014), and in 2017 completed Better, her PhD by practice, at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), interrogating how powerful dreams of “better” futures shape the things that get designed. She read architecture at the University of Cambridge, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and received her MA in Design Interactions from the RCA.

Ginsberg won the World Technology Award for design in 2011, the London Design Medal for Emerging Talent in 2012, the Dezeen Changemaker Award 2019, and Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention, Interactive Art for Machine Auguries 2020. Her work has twice been nominated for Designs of the Year (2011, 2015), with Designing for the Sixth Extinction described as “romantic, dangerous… and everything else that inspires us to change and question the world.” Ginsberg exhibits internationally, including at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of China, the Centre Pompidou, and the Royal Academy. Her work is held in private and museum permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Therme Art, and ZKM Karlsruhe.

Ginsberg is a resident at Somerset House Studios, London, and has launched her latest new commission Pollinator Pathmaker, with Editions at the Eden Project, Cornwall, and Serpentine, London, in 2022. The next Edition for Light Art Space, Berlin will be planted in summer 2023 and in Birmingham in Autumn 2023. She opened her first American solo exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art in April 2023.