Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

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Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, The Substitute, 2019. Installation view, The Lost Rhino, Jerwood Gallery, Natural History Museum, 2022. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum

“My practice looks at the strange prioritization we give to the new—the things we create—over the living things that already exist. I explore technologies that sit on the edge of the creation and recreation of life itself, from synthetic biology to artificial intelligence.”
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Portrait of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. Photo Nathalie Théry

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a multidisciplinary artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Ginsberg’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 is a resident at Somerset House Studios, London, and has launched her latest new commission Pollinator Pathmaker, with Edition Gardens at the Eden Project, Cornwall, and Serpentine, London, in 2022, with the next to be planted in 2023 for Light Art Space, Berlin. The interactive work uses an algorithmic garden design tool to create gardens not for humans, but the pollinators that sustain them.

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. In her recent exhibition The Lost Rhino at the Natural History Museum, London, Ginsberg showed The Substitute, a video installation which digitally recreates the nearly extinct subspecies of the northern white rhino. Superblue will present Ginsberg’s Machine Auguries: Toledo, a new site-specific, immersive installation simulating a natural dawn chorus using GAN technology at The Toledo Museum of Art from April 29.

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Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Pollinator Pathmaker, Pollinator Vision, 2023. © the artist

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Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sissel Tolaas, Christina Agapakis, Resurrecting the Sublime, 2019. Installation view, 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2021. Photo: Francesco Galli. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.

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Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Machine Auguries, 2019. Installation view, Somerset House, 2019. Photo © Luke Walker

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Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, The Wilding of Mars, 2019. Installation view, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 2021. Cappelletti ©️ 2021 Azienda Speciale Palaexpo.

Pollinator Pathmaker Eden Edition Garden, photographed in July 2022. Photo (c) Royston Hunt.

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Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Pollinator Pathmaker, Human Vision, 2023. © the artist