Attention Garden

Attention Garden is an interactive media installation that reimagines AI-generated content as an artificial ecosystem sustained by human attention. As generative AI makes visual production increasingly abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource through which digital objects gain visibility and persistence. Drawing on data from online generation platforms such as Civitai, the work turns this dynamic into a living system: generated images grow, compete, mutate, reproduce, and decay according to patterns of user engagement. Beneath this visible ecology, a computational root system uses speculative energy estimation to trace the physical infrastructure that sustains these seemingly immaterial forms. The installation unfolds across three screens: a dense flow of circulating images, the garden where visitors plant and tend them, and the root layer below. By mapping metrics such as generation frequency and social validation into organic growth behaviors, the work shows how digital culture is selected and sustained through distributed relationships among humans, models, and platforms. It frames agency not as the possession of a single actor, but as an emergent property of the whole network, and asks what ecological cost keeps that network alive.