Standing next to the four pieces at the UBB cafeteria exhibition

Strand ohne Palme playing at the after-event

The VDSEE Symposium 2026 included an Art & Science exhibition, organised by Mayline Goeb and Antonia Vogel, held on Thursday 26 February in the UBB cafeteria at the University of Vienna. The event invited PhD candidates from the Vienna Doctoral School of Ecology and Evolution to present artwork that draws on their research. After an opening by Chris Martine in HS2, guests were invited to the cafeteria to view the pieces and speak directly with the artists.

The exhibition featured works from seven contributors, spanning drawing, painting, sculpture, sound installation, and digital art. Carla Gomez-Montes presented “From Shadow to Light – Unveiling the Wild”, drawing on her work in archaeozoology and taphonomy. Nina Kraus showed “A Room in My Heart; An Inkling”, a sculpture and painting informed by her research in evolutionary theory and philosophy of science. Yseult Hejja-Brichard exhibited “Natural Beauty: A Deconstructed Perspective”, connecting visual ecology and sexual selection. Antonia Grausgruber, Rym Nouioua, and Lotte Doebke contributed further pieces drawing on embryology, bat bioacoustics, and freshwater ecology respectively. The evening also featured a live set by Strand ohne Palme, the band of Elias Kapitany, a PhD colleague from Stefan Dullinger’s group.

I contributed four digital works under the title Terminal Landscapes, all generated in R, each one translating a different part of my doctoral research into visual form. The descriptions below outline the scientific context behind each piece.

Nr. 1: Propagule

Nr. 2: Undercurrents

Nr. 3: Emergent Topology

Nr. 4: A Forest of Decisions

Nr. 1: Propagule

A propagule is any part of an organism that can give rise to a new individual: a seed, a spore, a fragment carried by wind or water. In my research, I model how invasive species spread across landscapes using dispersal kernels, mathematical functions that describe the probability of a propagule reaching any given distance from its source. This work transposes that function into a pictorial field, centering the viewer at the point of origin. The resulting chiaroscuro, a single luminous source against vast negative space, with faint indexical traces radiating outward toward where it might land.

Nr. 2: Undercurrents

This draws on my first PhD paper, which asks whether agricultural weeds in Central Europe have become more invasive over time. The underlying dataset compiles thousands of vegetation surveys spanning 1930 to 2020. The work gives this accumulation of fieldwork a chromatic body, translating decades of ecological change into currents that cross, converge, and pull apart. What the currents carry is a broader signal: the reorganisation of plant communities by human mobility, global trade, and land transformation, a process now unfolding at a planetary scale with no historical precedent.

Nr. 3: Emergent Topology

My research uses neural networks to predict habitat types from species composition. Each one starts as pure random noise; millions of inputs later, a structure grows: a latent geometry of inference, where coloured nodes trace activity and edges map the connections that emerged during training. A form of ecological perception that did not exist ten years ago.

Nr. 4: A Forest of Decisions

A decision tree splits data at every fork: yes or no, above or below, present or absent. Some algorithms grow hundreds of these trees in sequence, each one trained on the errors left behind by the last. This piece gives those structures arborescent form. The branching logic of the algorithm finds its formal counterpart in the branching morphology of actual trees, while the colour gradient from base to canopy traces the path data takes from input to prediction.