NET+ Creative Fellowship TOPIC 1

Creative Fellowship Host: Centre for Environmental Intelligence (CEI) – Exeter University as part of the UKRI funded Net+ Centre Net Positive Health & Climate Solutions 

Host Lead: Mayra Rodriguez 

Fellowship Title: Collective Creativity: Connecting  people, the environment & artificial intelligence 

Fellowship Topic Summary  

This Creative Fellowship offers the opportunity to work collectively with the CEI (https://environmentalintelligence.org.uk/) based at the University of Exeter. The CEI brings together researchers in machine learning, climate science, ecology and Earth observation. The Centre works closely with the Net+ Centre working on green space, heat and health, and public engagement.  

This fellowship hopes to explore how creative practice can bring new perspectives and uses of AI models and environmental data. We hope to explore how AI and environmental data could be used in creative ways to share different kinds of knowledge, give a voice to people and the natural world, or help us ask what a responsible relationship between AI and the environment could look like. 

Overview 

The Centre for Environmental Intelligence (CEI) uses responsible AI and data science to address environmental challenges. We work with partners including the Met Office, National Trust, and Natural England. Our work spans climate and weather, biodiversity and nature recovery. We build AI models that use satellite imagery, sensor readings, and climate model inputs/outputs to help understand, monitor and predict environmental changes.  

This Creative Fellowship starts from an open question: What role could AI play in how we understand, represent and care for the environment?  

Recent artwork by Matt Dryhusrt and Holly Herndon has shown that an AI model can itself be collective art, raising questions about who contributes to data, who owns it and whose voice the resulting tool carries.  

AI is increasingly used to model and communicate climate and health risks. However, public trust in AI is fragile, and even well-designed tools can feel distant to communities they are meant to serve. There is also the environmental footprint of these tools, which is now part of polarised public debate. We hope that working with a creative practitioner will extend our interdisciplinary approach to these issues.  

Location and Timings 

The Creative Fellowship will mainly be conducted at CEI, University of Exeter (Streatham Campus, Exeter). The fellow will be invited to workshops, activities (such as Town Halls and seminars), and our annual conferences. 

We could also arrange visits to outdoor sites linked to our climate and health research, and the South West, as well as Streatham campus’ outdoor green spaces.  

CEI is hosting a Machine Learning for Earth Observation conference in June 2027, and Environmental Intelligence Conference in September 2027, both opportunities to produce or share outcomes from the Fellowship.   

We can discuss a mutually agreed timeline after interview.   

Why do we want to work with a Creative Practitioner? 

Environmental AI models are mostly trained on scientific data such as satellite images and sensor records. Generative AI learns from the internet, which over-represents some places and voices, leaving out others. In both cases, local knowledge may be included unevenly, and rarely on the terms of the people it comes from. We want to explore whether environmental AI could include local knowledge on people’s own terms and give more weight to places and communities usually left out.  

There is also a tension in our work. We use AI to protect the environment, while AI’s footprint is growing and becoming more visible. We are good at improving the tools, accuracy and increasingly, providing measurements around direct impacts. But we have less experience on opening our tools to be shared and questioned, or tracing indirect impacts such as rebound effects, where more efficient tools lead to increased use and unintended economic, environmental or social consequences. These are questions which would benefit from a collaboration with a creative practitioner.  

Many artists are already exploring these questions. For example, FILE Sao Paulo exhibition, “Inter-creativity”, frames creativity as something that is shared between people, AI and living organisms.  

We do not know the answers yet, and we are keen for this collaboration to be open-ended. Our work at the Centre for Environment Intelligence is academic, technical and partially shaped by partners in government agencies, non-governmental organisations, and industry. We less often work with the wider public and creative practitioners. Hosting a Creative Fellow would push us to work differently and to ask more open questions about our work. We hope the collaboration leads to new ideas for how environmental AI can help people and nature, while helping us to be honest about its impact. 

We hope to gain skills in creative and participatory methods and find new ways of using and communicating AI. We also hope to be more reflective about assumptions in our tools and the environmental impact cost of the computation behind them.  

Building Shared Value  

We would love to welcome a Creative Fellow to our CEI lab meetings, workshops and ongoing activities during the year. We would show how we build and test our models and welcome the Fellow to facilitate sessions to share their practice too.  

Our datasets and models could become materials for your practice. This might mean satellite images, sensor data or energy logs from our computing.