LONDON.- The first in a series of art installations in the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum, The Lost Rhino invites us to explore extinction, conservation and technology. At its centre sits The Substitute, a digitally recreated, life-sized northern white rhino. With the subspecies on the edge of extinction, Ginsberg's hyper-realistic recreation forces us to reflect on whether this new lifeform, created using technology, can ever be a substitute for the real thing.

At its centre sits The Substitute, a video installation by artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg that brings visitors face-to-face with a digitally recreated, life-sized northern white rhino. With the subspecies nearly extinct, this piece explores the paradox of our preoccupation with creating new life forms, while neglecting existing ones.




Displayed alongside Ginsberg's installation is a film of pulsating northern white rhino heart cells grown in the lab, Albrecht Dürer's iconic but inaccurate Rhinoceros woodcut print from 1515 and a rhino from the Museum's collection.

The Substitute is a video installation of a digitally recreated, life-sized northern white rhino. Using data generated by artificial intelligence agency DeepMind, the rhino learns from its environment. Starting off pixelated and unaware of its surroundings, as it roams the empty, sterile space it begins to gain intelligence and become increasingly more life-like. With its behaviour, movements and sounds informed by rare research footage taken of the last herd, this hyper-realistic recreation makes us question whether this new lifeform created using technology can really be a substitute for the real thing.

Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg investigates the fraught relationship between humans and nature in our era of radical technological and scientific advancement. Ginsberg works across multiple mediums, from digital simulations to living gardens. Her work looks at subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, conservation, evolution, synthetic biology and the history of science as she questions our impulse to ‘better’ the world as we paradoxically destroy our environment.

Ginsberg exhibits her work internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the National Museum of China in Beijing, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Royal Academy in London.