The Dept. of Species Services (DSS)

Concept Video:

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Artificial intelligence is still widely understood as a tool, optimized for efficiency, scale, and economic productivity. Yet as these systems expand, they are already reshaping the conditions of work itself. Automation promises convenience while producing a growing sense of instability: what roles remain for humans, and who, or what, defines their value? At the same time, the infrastructures that sustain AI carry significant ecological cost, consuming energy at scales that mirror the crises they are often tasked to address.

The Department of Species Services (DSS) proposes an alternative trajectory. Set in a near future, DSS is an AI-managed ecological commons trust, an institutional system that coordinates human participation across multi-species environments. Operating under a Neo-Gaian framework, DSS treats the biosphere as a shared, interdependent network in which humans, animals, plants, and microbial life are co-participants.

Here, AI no longer functions solely as a tool, but as a governance layer, monitoring ecological conditions, identifying imbalances, and allocating human intervention where it produces the least disruption and the greatest systemic benefit. Rather than optimizing for human productivity, DSS redefines labor as ecological function. Work is no longer organized around markets or nations, but around sustaining the continuity of living systems.

Within this model, human anxiety around obsolescence is not resolved, but redirected. Humans are not replaced, they are reassigned. Roles emerge where ecological gaps appear, positioning human presence as a form of support within planetary processes.

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The installation materializes one such role: the Human Pollinator.

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In California ecosystems, the yellow-faced bumblebee has long performed the largely invisible labor of pollinating fields of California poppies each spring. This seasonal exchange sustains not only the reproduction of Eschscholzia californica, but also broader networks of soil stability, pollinator life cycles, and regional biodiversity. When a sudden and unexplained pollinator collapse disrupts this relationship, DSS initiates an emergency intervention. Human workers are recruited to temporarily assume the role of the bee, hand-pollinating poppy fields to preserve the next generation of wildflowers and prevent the seasonal landscape from disappearing.

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Equipped with a DSS Pollination Glove, participants engage in a precise, repetitive gesture that transforms human touch into ecological labor. Through this act, the project reframes the human role: not as steward or observer, but as a worker embedded within a larger system of life.

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Operating at the threshold between fiction and institutional plausibility, DSS transforms speculative futures into operational systems. It does not resolve the contradictions of AI, but reorganizes them, proposing a world in which intelligence, both artificial and biological, is redirected toward sustaining the conditions of life.

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Ultimately, The Department of Species Services invites a rethinking of labor, value, and responsibility in the age of AI, asking not what AI can do for humans, but what humans are still needed for within a shared planetary system.

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