Umwelt — from the German, meaning “environment” — was coined by biologist Jakob von Uexküll to describe the unique subjective world each organism inhabits. No two species perceive the same reality.
Umwelt AI is a collection of 512 tech-organic species generated through artificial intelligence and inscribed permanently on the Bitcoin blockchain via the Ordinals protocol. Each creature is a hybrid of deep-sea biology and computer hardware: GPUs, cooling fans, transparent cases, fused into forms that have never existed and could not exist outside this moment.
They live at inscription numbers 45,000 to 47,000. There are now millions. Find them if you dig deep enough.
THE CONCEPT
The question at the center of this work is simple and unanswerable: do we evolve as technology does, or does technology evolve as we do? Umwelt AI does not answer it. It inhabits it. These 512 species exist at the intersection of two ecosystems, the ocean floor and the server room, neither fully biological nor fully mechanical. They are what emerges when one system starts dreaming about the other.
THE METHOD
The images were generated using Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL-E during early 2023, the same moment these tools entered mass consciousness. They were then inscribed directly onto individual satoshis on the Bitcoin blockchain using the Ordinals protocol: 30 MB of data, permanently carved into the earliest layer of a new medium. To do the same on Ethereum would have been economically impossible. The choice of Bitcoin was not incidental. It is proof-of-work, an energy-hungry system not unlike the GPU farms that trained the models that made the images. The creatures carry that cost in their bodies.
THE CONTEXT
Umwelt AI shares lineage with Pierre Huyghe’s Uumwelt (Serpentine Galleries, 2018), where AI-generated imagery was fed into a living ecosystem, blurring the boundary between biological and computational processes. Where Huyghe worked with a physical space, this project works with a ledger, replacing the gallery wall with the blockchain as the site of permanence. Future researchers doing archaeology on early Bitcoin inscriptions will find these species dated to 2023: the year Ordinals appeared, the year AI image generation became ordinary, the year this particular symbiosis was still strange enough to be worth making.
By FAR. Interview by Benoit Palop.