A peek into living species considered “too dirty” for AI datasets, and thus, on track to be forgotten for good...

this archival case shows a snippet of living species that have vanished from AI datasets. during AI model training, vast amounts of data are scraped from the internet. unusable data is subsequently filtered out in a cleaning process, including words from the infamous “list of dirty, naughty, obscene, and otherwise bad words”. this block list-filter doesn’t consider context at all, deeming the pussy ears and the slippery dick as filthy data.

this installation frames data mining as an extinction event. as we take away the earth layer by layer in a quest for cobalt, and flood the atacama with acid lithium pools, what will get lost in the pursuit of optimization?

inspired by the research of: jiawen uffline
made for come together 2026 amsterdam, frascati
pictures by reinout bos