Speculative ecologies, decoy systems, and machine dreaming
Water Lentil is the Fancy Name for Duckweed is an ongoing research-creation project exploring speculative ecologies at the intersection of DIY bio-culture, environmental remediation, and generative machine learning. The project takes its name from duckweed’s rebranding as “water lentils” in a shift that gestures toward the ways humble, weedy organisms are reframed within contemporary narratives of green innovation, sustainability, and techno-solutionism.
At the centre of the work are a series of sculptural “growth units,” systems, and media installations that resemble domestic or small-scale bioremediation devices. These fictional apparatuses borrow from the aesthetics of aquaculture, hydroponics, backyard science, and startup green design, while quietly unsettling the promise that ecological repair can be engineered, optimized, and commodified.
Alongside these sculptural forms, the project engages generative adversarial networks (GANs) trained on gathered images of ducks, duckweed, ponds, decoys, and speculative drawings. Through a practice I call data gleaning, datasets are assembled from walking, observing, photographing, and drawing in local wetland environments, as well as from constructed decoy forms within the studio. The resulting images do not document these ecologies but conjure them; producing uncanny, plausible, and impossible wetland organisms that hover between care and simulation.
The GAN’s latent space becomes a speculative pond: a computational ecology where forms drift, merge, and mutate. These generated images, printed as part of the Decoy series, act as visual companions to the sculptural growth units and suggest future wetlands that are at once fertile, artificial, and unresolved. Together, the works ask how ecological imaginaries are shaped by both grassroots DIY culture and extractive green capitalism, and where artistic practice might open space for other ways of sensing, waiting, and tending.
The project approaches both living systems and machine learning as sympoietic processes or worlding practices that emerge through relation rather than control. Duckweed, microbes, water, plastic decoys, sensors, and neural networks are treated not as tools, but as collaborators in a shared speculative ecology.
This blog documents the project as a living process: field notes from latent ponds, reflections on slowness and failure, training logs, material experiments, and conceptual drift. It is a space to think with wetlands; both biological and computational, while tracing how decoy systems might become sites for care, critique, and more-than-human imagination.
This project is generously supported by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, whose funding is enabling the development and presentation of this work as part of its next phase.
Decoy Dataset I - 8 different ducks (20 images each) in an inflatable hot tub.