media · Picked by us
Drones, machine vision and one plant that may not exist anymore
Laura Cinti, Howard Boland and Debbie Jewitt turned the hunt for a lone male Encephalartos woodii into a data-driven audiovisual installation — drone surveys, synthetic training images, detection at canopy scale. Best in Show, SIGGRAPH 2025.
Process interview: the survey, the synthetic images and the search
Official project page and installation media
What it is
See machine vision used as an art form and a field method: a search for a cycad whose last known survivor is male — a species that depends on a female nobody has found.
Who it is for
People interested in ecological art, machine vision and honest science storytelling.
How it was made
- Models
- Custom-trained object detection · creator-reported
- Tools
- Drone survey imaging · Multispectral canopy mappingSynthetic training images · Teaching detection for a target that is nearly absent
- Fieldwork first: drone surveys and multispectral maps of the forest that holds the last-known male.
- Because positive examples barely exist — the female may be gone — the team trained detection models with synthetic images and ground-truthing.
- The installation turns the method into the visual grammar: aerial grids, false colour, detection boxes and spoken testimony.
What the person did
Cinti and Boland lead C-LAB’s art-research practice; Jewitt (Nelson Mandela University) anchors the botany; the search continues.
What we know
Creator-reported: Official project page, the SIGGRAPH 2025 Best in Show award and the SIGGRAPH process interview; C-LAB profiles resolve.
Access checked — 2026-09-27 · Opened the project page, the SIGGRAPH interview and the award reference on 2026-09-27.
Can you use it?
Project images are credited to C-LAB and collaborators with no reuse licence; we do not embed them. The project’s official overview video plays through YouTube’s official player when a visitor loads it, and we host no copy of it. The cover is an original Made With Models illustration, not a frame from the installation. The work documents a continuing search — it does not claim the plant was found.
About this project
Picked by Made With Models. Added 2026-09-27. Updated 2026-09-27.