iCooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum · Upper East Side
The Substitute
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's immersive video and sound installation digitally resurrects an extinct male Northern white rhino using AI and visual effects, questioning whether species resurrection is a justified answer to extinction.
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The rhino starts as a cloud of brown and grey squares in a plain white room. Over a six-minute loop it learns where the walls are, and its body and sounds sharpen from pixels into something that looks alive.
It isn't, which is the point. Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, died in March 2018, and scientists stored his DNA for possible de-extinction. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg answered with this life-size projection, 5 metres wide: its behaviour comes from DeepMind research on AI agents, its sounds from rare footage of the last herd. You watch a species come back as a simulation while a second screen plots its path. Ginsberg's question: "Can we conscionably resurrect a species when we couldn't keep it alive in the first place?"
It's one work inside the Design Across Time collection display, so general admission covers it: a reduced $10 for adults during an upstairs gallery changeover, free for under-18s, pay what you wish 5 to 6pm daily.
Look for
The pixel rhino
Look for the rhino as a blur of brown and grey squares at the start of the loop, sharpening into a lifelike animal as it learns the white room.
The data screen
A second screen beside the projection plays the experiment's data, tracing the rhino's path and the development of grid cells as it learns its space.
The last herd's voices
Listen for the rhino's sounds, adapted from rare research footage of the final northern white rhino herd.
Good for
- An Hour Or Less
- Nerding Out
- Teenagers
Skip if
You want a full exhibition: this is a single six-minute video work inside the collection galleries.
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Image credits
9
- The SubstituteCourtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
- Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to NowCourtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Collection in Focus: Modern European CurrentsPhoto: Ariel Ione Williams, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
- Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love YouCourtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design MuseumEpicgenius, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumAjay Suresh, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
- Neue Galerie New YorkFrancesca.hyanna19 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- The Metropolitan Museum of ArtHugo Schneider, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
- American Museum of Natural HistoryIngfbruno, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0