The Ecology of Forking Paths

The Ecology of Forking Paths is a speculative documentary and sculptural installation reconstructing landscapes that became too pristine to sustain themselves, environments that collapsed under the weight of their own perfection, in a logic that is at once ecological and informational. The title draws from Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths and its later entanglement with the many-worlds interpretation, holding the work’s branching, non-sequential structure as a given.

Its central figure, the Bird, is modelled on the Erosion Bird, an AI cryptid that emerged from the residue of generative image models, appearing across iterations without ever being prompted. In the film, the Bird arrives in each environment shortly before its dissolution: a vessel for model collapse, appearing when generative systems begin to exceed the logics that produced them.

The work is presented as the third volume of observational notes attributed to a chronicler of systems in decline. The entries are partial, asynchronous, and refuse to add up. What the records gesture toward is a larger system of which only fragments remain accessible — and toward an account that has already been incomplete for some time.

About the artist

Jonatan T. Wejnold is a Danish artist, composer, and educator based in Bergen. Working across CGI, moving image, sound, and installation, his practice uses worldbuilding and fictioning to explore computational mythologies, synthetic ecologies, and speculative futures shaped by technological systems. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art. His work has been presented internationally, including at Tate Modern, Montez Press Radio, Kunsthal Aarhus, and The Truman Brewery.