Moren's Work Highlight on MN Artists

Faculty member Ben Moren's work Reference Ecosystem: Lost 40 has been highlighted on MN Artists.

Reference Ecosystem: Lost 40 is a selected archive of images generated using a Machine Learning Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which has been trained using thousands of source photographs of Northern Minnesota’s Lost 40 Scientific and Natural Area (SNA). Everest Pipkin, who wrote the MN Artists essay, says the work reminds them of the Bastrop Pines of Central Texas, near where they grew up.

"The Bastrop pines are a disjunct population, left stranded in Central Texas during the last ice age as the forest withdrew its range north and eastward.3 The Lost 40 are also a fragment of old-growth forest, a relic from another time. Unlike the loblolly of Bastrop, however, the red and white pines are more recent orphans; they were left standing when the state was otherwise clear-cut in the 1800s. This was, I’m told, because of a mapping error that labeled the stand of trees as underwater," says Pipkin.

Moren describes his project as "an attempt to digitally re-grow the forest from fragmentary data, the images acting as a kind of preservation through simulation." With the current rate of climate change, Minnesota threatens to shift to a prairie biome within 50 years. Reference Ecosystem: Lost 40 digitally preserves habitats as we know them today. "They’re beautiful images, truly, mysterious and compelling. But they are also deeply sad, in the way a eulogy is always beholden to the poverty of recreation—how an image created of a subject that is gone, or will soon be gone, can never replace what is lost. How it can only remind us that it once lived," Pipkin says of the work.

A book chronicling Reference Ecosystem: Lost 40, featuring essays by Pipkin, Kate Casanova ’08, and Morgan Erickson-Davis is forthcoming.

Learn More

• Ghost Pines: The Haunted Forests of a Machine Learning Dataset
  (mnartists.walkerart.org—June 10, 2022)
• Preorder Reference Ecosystem: Lost 40
• Moren's Website