Infinity Species Generator

Infinity Species Generator is an interactive website that draws on computer-vision datasets and machine-learning libraries to autonomously produce a new image and name for a fictional species every nineteen minutes.

The work connects AI-generated art with the Buddhist idea that beings neither arise nor cease. It constructs a virtual image of the sixth mass extinction and proposes an ecological use of technology. Ren began the project after reading E. O. Wilson's estimate that one species disappears every nineteen minutes.

Ren assembled biological datasets and treated the logic of gene editing and evolutionary theory as a speculative framework. The resulting system presents an idealized future in which human and ecological systems evolve together.

The website ran for more than a year. In October 2021, Ren used the thousands of virtual species generated since June 2020 to train a StyleGAN2 model.

Ren recorded the StyleGAN2 model as it formed virtual life, condensing the process into a nineteen-minute countdown. Each minute follows the work's temporal sequence and was issued as a unique NFT. Collectors received the corresponding one-minute high-resolution moving-image file.