The Crisis of Memory in the Anthropocene
We are currently navigating an era of unprecedented ecological precarity. According to recent scientific assessments, an estimated 45 percent of all known flowering plants are threatened with extinction. As the foundational ecosystem builders that support all life on Earth, profoundly shaping human societies through food, medicine, art, and culture, the loss of these species represents not only a biological catastrophe but a catastrophic erasure of cultural memory. In response to this crisis, a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field has emerged: the Plant Humanities. This discipline seeks to urgently recontextualize our relationship with the natural world by bridging the empirical sciences with history, literature, and the arts. However, as the pace of ecological collapse accelerates, scholars and artists are increasingly turning toward a novel, seemingly paradoxical ally: Artificial Intelligence (AI).
At the forefront of this critical intersection is Dr. Lucas Mertehikian, a scholar, curator, and educator currently serving as a Research Scholar at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Pratt Institute. From October 2023 through July 2025, he served as the Director of the NYBG Humanities Institute. While he has transitioned from this directorial role, he continues to coordinate the Garden’s Larry Lederman Landscape Photography Fellowship. Additionally, he contributes externally to Dumbarton Oaks’ Plant Humanities Initiative, providing critical insights and guidance in the development of public programming and editorial content.
Mertehikian’s work has historically centered on decolonizing the botanical archive and examining the historical migrations of plants and people. Yet, in recent years, his eco-curatorial practice has expanded to embrace algorithmic technologies. By collaborating with contemporary artists who utilize AI-trained models to simulate, visualize, and “resurrect” endangered or extinct flora, Mertehikian is pioneering a new conceptual framework. He demonstrates how AI and machine learning, often viewed as alienating, extractive forces, can instead function as vital instruments for cultivating ecological resilience, preserving environmental memory, and radically reimagining the botanical archive for the twenty-first century.
The Original Dataset: Reimagining the Botanical Archive
To understand Mertehikian’s engagement with artificial intelligence, one must first examine his philosophical approach to the traditional botanical archive. Mertehikian has noted that his passion for the intersection of plants and art was galvanized by his encounter with historical botanical collections. “Pressed plants that have survived centuries in some cases, stored in botanical gardens and other institutions around the world,” he observes, “made me think of how nature can also be art, and how the world is interconnected through a history of natural and human exchanges.”
For centuries, the herbarium has functioned as the primary technology of botanical memory. Dried, pressed specimens mounted on paper served as data points for European taxonomists to categorize global biomes, often stripping the plants of their indigenous contexts and complex ecological networks. In the context of the digital age, these herbaria can be understood as the original ecological datasets. Today, as machine learning models require vast amounts of visual and textual data to generate outputs, they inherently rely on these historical archives.
Mertehikian’s insight is that the transition from the physical herbarium sheet to the digital algorithm is not a break from history, but a continuation of it. If historical botanical archives were curated through the lens of colonial expansion and imperial science, then any AI trained on these archives risks replicating those biases. Therefore, Mertehikian’s role as a humanities scholar is critical: he provides the necessary epistemological friction. By contextualizing the history of these “datasets,” he ensures that the technological ecosystems we build are rooted in restorative justice rather than historical erasure. He frames AI not as a replacement for the physical archive, but as an active, dynamic extension of it, a tool that can synthesize centuries of fragmented data to reveal the hidden narratives of the natural world.
Simulating Survival: The Extinction and Resurrection of Flora
Mertehikian’s theoretical integration of technology and ecology was brilliantly manifested in the 2025 Plant Humanities Conversations, a highly acclaimed series co-organized by Mertehikian and Dr. Yota Batsaki (Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University). The series was designed to explore the wonder, fragility, and resilience of plant life by bringing together experts to discuss the protection of biodiversity.
The most groundbreaking session of this series took place on May 14, 2025, titled “Plant Extinction & Resurrection.” Moderated by Matthew Battles, the session featured award-winning artists Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Debora Hirsch. Both artists are renowned for drawing upon scientific research and utilizing artificial intelligence, machine learning models, and advanced visual techniques to explore the fragile boundary between existence and extinction.
During this conversation, the concept of “plant resurrection” was examined not as a literal biological revival, but as an act of algorithmic memory. When a plant species goes extinct, the ecological void it leaves behind is absolute. However, by feeding AI models historical descriptions, genomic data, traditional ecological knowledge, and artistic renderings, artists can generate simulations of these lost species. Mertehikian’s curatorial framing of this dialogue emphasized that AI allows us to visualize the ghosts of the Anthropocene. It provides a visual and emotional vocabulary for grief and loss, transforming abstract extinction statistics (such as the 45 percent figure) into visceral, immediate artistic experiences.
Through these dialogues, Mertehikian champions the idea that technological ecosystems, virtual environments generated by algorithms, can foster real-world empathy. By viewing an AI-resurrected flower, the public is forced to confront the finality of human-driven extinction. In this way, technology becomes a mechanism for cultivating emotional and political resilience, urging societies to protect the biodiversity that still remains.
Vanishing Trees: The Aesthetics of Algorithmic Memory
This intellectual trajectory has culminated in Mertehikian’s ongoing collaboration with the acclaimed artist Debora Hirsch. From January 15 to April 15, 2026, the Palazzo Citterio in Milan is hosting Hirsch’s deeply evocative exhibition, Vanishing Trees, a project that has garnered widespread critical attention from major European publications, including Il Giornale dell’ Arte, Rivista Arte Mondadori, and Ansa. Hirsch’s work leverages AI-trained models to create haunting, ethereal representations of endangered and vanishing arboreal networks.
Mertehikian’s contribution to Vanishing Trees is foundational: he authored the critical texts that accompany the exhibition. This collaboration perfectly illustrates why the integration of AI in art necessitates the presence of the humanities. An AI model can generate a visually stunning image of a decaying forest, but it cannot explain the historical mechanisms of deforestation, the impact of colonial resource extraction, or the cultural significance of the trees to indigenous populations. Mertehikian’s texts act as the anchor, tethering the synthetic, algorithmically generated images to the grounded reality of human history.
In his writings for the exhibition, Mertehikian positions Hirsch’s AI-generated trees as “prosthetic memories.” When human activity eradicates a physical forest, the landscape suffers amnesia. The AI artworks step into this void, serving as digital monuments to organic loss. Mertehikian elucidates how Hirsch’s use of machine learning subverts the typical tech-industry narrative of endless progress and infinite growth. Instead of using AI to build utopian futures, Vanishing Trees uses AI to mourn the present. By bridging text, technology, and botany, Mertehikian and Hirsch create a hybridized space where the viewer is simultaneously confronted by the cutting edge of human innovation and the devastating consequences of human destruction.
Decolonizing the Algorithm: Ethnobotany and Digital Justice
Mertehikian’s engagement with AI cannot be isolated from his broader academic commitment to decolonization, as evidenced by his extensive scholarship on Latin American natural history and his leadership in curating the African American Garden at NYBG (2023-2024). In his broader work, Mertehikian has consistently exposed how the botanical archive has historically marginalized the knowledge systems of African, Indigenous, and Latin American peoples.
When introducing artificial intelligence into the Plant Humanities, Mertehikian brings this critical decolonial lens to the technology itself. Algorithms are only as equitable as the data upon which they are trained. If an AI model is trained to generate botanical imagery or catalog plant data using only Western taxonomies, it will inherently reproduce the erasure of indigenous ethnobotany.
Mertehikian’s scholarship, including his recent co-edited volume, The Boom of Natural History in Latin American Culture (University of Florida Press, January 2026), and his upcoming book, Fake Originals: Collecting Latin America, interrogates the politics of collecting and archiving. Applied to the digital realm, his theories suggest a need for “algorithmic justice” in the botanical sciences. To cultivate true ecological resilience, we must ensure that future AI models are trained on diverse, decolonized datasets. They must recognize the medicinal knowledge of the Amazonian tribes that first cultivated Guaraná, and the agricultural mastery of enslaved African populations who shaped the American landscape.
By functioning as a mediator among landscape architects, artists, botanists, and technologists, Mertehikian is subtly advocating for a polyvocal technological ecosystem. He insists that the digital archives of the future must correct the deliberate omissions of the past, utilizing the immense processing power of AI to elevate the marginalized voices of global environmental history.
Pedagogy for a Hybrid World: Pratt Institute and Built Environments
The theoretical frameworks Mertehikian develops in the museum and the gallery are actively translated into practical application in the classroom. As a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Master in Landscape Architecture program at the Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture, Mertehikian is uniquely positioned to influence the next generation of spatial designers.
Modern landscape architecture is a field increasingly dominated by digital modeling, algorithmic design, and geographic information systems (GIS). Students are taught to construct landscapes in virtual space long before a single seed is planted in the earth. Mertehikian’s pedagogy disrupts the purely technical application of these tools. He introduces his students to the Plant Humanities, urging them to view their digital design software not merely as tools for spatial organization, but as instruments of cultural and ecological memory.
He teaches future architects that an ecosystem is no longer strictly biological; it is fundamentally intertwined with the technological. How a landscape is mapped, modeled, and predicted by algorithms directly impacts how it will survive the ravages of climate change. By teaching students to critically examine the intersection of digital rendering and biological reality, Mertehikian fosters a new breed of landscape architects. These professionals understand that building resilient public spaces requires synthesizing the latest technological advancements with a deep, historical respect for the flora and the communities that inhabit the land.
Lives, Seeds, and Data in Transit
There is a profound, unifying thread that connects all of Mertehikian’s intellectual pursuits, from his highly acclaimed 2025 book Vidas en tránsito. Historia íntima del pasaporte (Lives in Transit: An Intimate History of the Passport) to his exploration of AI-generated flora. That thread explores borders, migration, and the systems we build to manage them.
In Vidas en tránsito, Mertehikian explores the passport as a technology of state control—a paper algorithm that dictates human movement and identity. The herbarium specimen is a similar technology that determines the identity and classification of a plant. Today, artificial intelligence represents the newest and most powerful classification system humanity has ever invented. Data, like seeds and refugees, is constantly in transit, migrating across digital borders, being processed, categorized, and transformed.
Mertehikian’s genius lies in his ability to see the inherent connections between these disparate systems. He recognizes that whether we are tracking a human life moving across a national border, a honeysuckle vine invading Borges’s Buenos Aires, or an algorithm processing the genetic memory of an extinct tree, we are witnessing the profound struggle for survival and adaptation.
The work of Dr. Lucas Mertehikian represents a vital evolution in the environmental humanities. By leading the Humanities Institute at the New York Botanical Garden and collaborating with vanguard artists and technologists, he is expanding the definition of what a botanical garden can be in the twenty-first century. Under his intellectual stewardship, the garden is no longer just a physical sanctuary for living plants; it is a critical node in a vast, global, and increasingly digital network of ecological memory.
Artificial intelligence, often criticized for its environmental footprint and its potential to detach humanity from the organic world, is reclaimed in Mertehikian’s practice as a potent tool for ecological reflection. Through events like the Plant Extinction & Resurrection conversations and exhibitions like Vanishing Trees, he proves that technology can be harnessed to deepen our empathy for the natural world, rather than severing our connection to it.
Ultimately, Mertehikian teaches us that resilience is not merely a biological trait; it is a cultural practice. Cultivating resilience requires us to utilize every tool at our disposal—from the ancient, pressed leaves of a colonial herbarium to the complex, predictive algorithms of a machine learning model. By bridging the humanistic, the biological, and the technological, Lucas Mertehikian is not just mapping the history of our ecosystems; he is providing the intellectual architecture necessary to ensure their survival.
About Dr. Lucas Mertehikian
He is a scholar, curator, and educator working at the intersection of the environmental humanities, landscape architecture, and Latin American culture. He currently serves as a Research Scholar at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) and as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Master in Landscape Architecture program at the Pratt Institute. Previously, from October 2023 through July 2025, he served as the Director of the NYBG Humanities Institute.
Mertehikian holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University and formerly served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Plant Humanities at Dumbarton Oaks. He continues to contribute externally to Dumbarton Oaks’ Plant Humanities Initiative, providing valuable insights and contributions to the development of public programming and editorial content.
His interdisciplinary work explores the historical, cultural, and political dimensions of the botanical archive and the parallel ecologies of human migration. At NYBG, he continues to coordinate the prestigious Larry Lederman Landscape Photography Fellowship and previously oversaw the execution of the African American Garden.
A prolific author and researcher, Dr. Mertehikian recently published the critically acclaimed book Vidas en tránsito. Historia íntima del pasaporte (2025) and the co-edited academic volume The Boom of Natural History in Latin American Culture (January 2026). He frequently collaborates with contemporary artists to decolonize botanical narratives, most notably co-organizing the 2025 Plant Humanities Conversations and contributing critical texts to Debora Hirsch’s current 2026 exhibition, Vanishing Trees, in Milan.