In Conversation with the NFF Fellows: Matthew C Wilson

Every year, three artists work on their own innovative research at the intersection of technology and society in the NFF Fellowships Programme. In this special programme, everything is up for discussion: the questions being asked, the methods used, even the outcomes are not fixed. To give insight into their work forms, dilemmas, and motivations, Paulien Dresscher, curator of the programme and researcher in the field of digital culture, engages in conversation with the Fellows.

The second Fellow this year is Matthew C Wilson.

Fellows 2025-2026
Part 2:  Matthew C Wilson

The End of the Divide Between Nature and Culture 

Matthew C. Wilson is an American artist, researcher and filmmaker, and part of the third cohort of NFF Fellows. In his films, installations and sculptures, he explores how science, technology and nature are becoming ever more entangled. Drawing on conversations with scientists around the world, he imagines alternative realities and possible futures. His central question: what happens to our way of life as the line between nature and culture becomes increasingly blurred?

Traditionally, we've placed ourselves outside of and above nature. We tend to think of humans as having culture, making conscious decisions and assigning meaning to their actions; a river or bacterium cannot.We're used to seeing ourselves as observers and masters of nature, bending it to our will. But this traditional worldview is beginning to show cracks — in philosophy, with thinkers like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and Rosi Braidotti; in land art and Indigenous knowledge systems; and in science, where microbiome research reveals just how much the human body consists of bacterial ecosystems, and plant neurobiology raises questions about whether communication is an exclusively human capacity.

According to Wilson, this distinction between nature and culture is outdated, and he's searching for new ways to understand the world. As an artist, he tracks developments in science to explore what forms society might take in the future. He then translates these ideas into stories, films, scenarios and sculptures — to help prepare us for what's ahead.

The Anthropocene: A Contested Term

In our conversation, Wilson explains how the distinction between nature and culture comes under pressure from the Anthropocene: a proposed name for the era in which human activity has become so extensive that it's reshaping the Earth itself. We see this everywhere: plastics and PFAS persist in the environment, landscapes transformed by urban development, data centres and solar farms, species going extinct, glaciers melting. This has accelerated sharply since the Second World War, driven by industrialisation.

Yet the term itself is contested. The greatest impact on the climate crisis doesn't come from humanity as a whole, but from a specific subgroup — culturally, economically and geopolitically defined. “Humanity's impact on the climate lies mainly in carbon emissions, and those are unevenly distributed across the world's population. It's mostly post-industrial societies, and the moment at which that ‘industrialisation clock’ starts ticking is what determines the scale of the impact,” says Wilson. That offers a different perspective on ecological responsibility — one that doesn't apply equally to the whole of humankind.

Earth, Life and Thought as One System

To move beyond the nature–culture divide, which treats humans and their culture as separate from other organisms and the physical Earth, Wilson turns to the ideas of the early twentieth-century scientist Vladimir Vernadsky.

Vernadsky saw the Earth as a system in which matter, life and thought continuously influence one another. In his framework, rocks, minerals and physical processes form the geosphere; all living organisms make up the biosphere; and human thought, knowledge and technology together make up the noosphere. In his view, it's the feedback loop that matters most: what humans imagine and build changes the planet, while the planet, in turn, shapes how humans can live and think — the one cannot exist without the other.

The Factitious

If humans are themselves part of natural processes, then the distinction between what's “made” and what's “natural” also becomes less clear-cut. Wilson calls this borderland the factitious. By this, he means things that arise through human intervention, but which are no less real for it. The concept helps Wilson think through new forms of life, matter and environment that emerge at the boundary of nature, technology and imagination. Wilson: “The factitious is something like ‘synthetic’, but I find it more elegant because it echoes ‘fact’ while also sounding like ‘fiction’. The factitious names the space between nature and culture: things that arise through human intervention yet are entirely real — not illusions or representations, but authentic entities that didn't exist in the world before.”

Concrete examples of this can be found in synthetic biology. This might involve lifelike structures designed by humans, laboratory processes that mimic natural growth, or materials that behave as though they came from nature while being artificially produced. Such examples make clear why Wilson's questions aren't merely theoretical. They touch on a world in which human technology no longer just produces tools, but also makes possible new forms of life, matter and environment. As Wilson puts it: “My work as an artist is organised around synthetic biology. The question I want to raise through it is about what happens when human technology starts producing not just tools, but also new forms of life, matter and world.”

This concept is also central to his work Factitious Flora, an experimental film about possible futures for plants. The film explores how plants might be seen not only as natural organisms, but also as part of networks involving humans, machines and planetary processes. In doing so,Wilson shows in concrete terms what ‘the factitious’ can mean: a reality in which the natural and the manufactured can no longer be easily separated.

From Sculpture to Cinematic Prototype

As an artist and filmmaker, Wilson explores synthetic biology and synthetic life. Conversations with scientists across a wide range of disciplines are his primary source of inspiration: rather than simply reading papers, he visits laboratories, research groups and conferences around the world. As he puts it himself: “I don't have a scientific degree — I'm essentially just an interested outsider. The only difference between me and any other non-specialists is that I've spent time on this.” What he brings is sustained curiosity and the ability to connect different domains — a skill rooted in his background in literature, visual art and analytical thinking.

His research began in sculpture — a medium he considers ‘real’: a physical object you can experience bodily and spatially. According to Wilson, a sculpture demands more of your interpretive capacity than a moving image, perhaps precisely because it has no story or characters for the viewer to identify with. An installation expands on this, creating a more immersive environment, but still lacks a narrative dimension. Film, Wilson argues, resolves this.

Wilson does not consider these outcomes the definitive endpoint of his research. In his presentation at the NFF, he therefore presents the work in a deliberately provisional form. He presents a growing catalogue of hybrid, synthetic-biological ‘specimens’, assembled from conversations with scientists, laboratory visits and existing research. These specimens give concrete form to what Wilson explores through the factitious: forms of life in which the distinction between what is natural, technological and human-designed becomes ever harder to sustain. From this catalogue, Wilson has selected a number of specimens and developed them further into short cinematic prototypes: cinematic glimpses of possible worlds in which these organisms exist and continue to evolve. They don't offer fixed visions of the future, but invite audiences to speculate about what these new forms of life might become, and how they might change the worlds we live in.

Design Fiction: Not Stories, But Worlds

Wilson presents his scenarios deliberately as snapshots — as seeds rather than finished works. “What I'm showing at the festival are fragments pointing towards future films at a higher resolution; they're not finished works yet.”

In doing so, he draws on Bruce Sterling's definition of design fiction: you don't so much tell a story about a possible future as show a world in which the future already exists. The object, prototype, image or artefact then serves as evidence from that world. Wilson: “So the work doesn't so much tell ‘stories’ as show ‘worlds’ — seeds of a future.”

Looking ahead, Wilson wants to develop these fragments into fully developed narrative films, writing scripts, casting actors and assembling crews, while remaining rooted in the context of galleries and artists’ cinema.

In Essence: Imagination as Preparation

Wilson uses imagination in his work to help prepare us for future changes that are still difficult to foresee. For him, biotechnology isn't science fiction, but a development quietly shaping the world of tomorrow, out of sight of the general public. By presenting these possible worlds before they become reality, he invites viewers to imagine the human, ecological and cultural dimensions of that futureStill, Wilson resists the idea that his work should serve science communication: “I don't believe perform a specific task or deliver a particular outcome on behalf of science— that would be a burden on the arts. What art can do instead, and what I try to use it for, is create unfamiliar experiences for viewers: encounters so novel that they let someone see the world with new eyes.”

A scientific model, such as a climate projection, can tell us what will happen if certain trends continue, but not what it will feel like to live in that future. Film offers a different tool for that: the ability to imagine and experience future scenarios before they become reality. A story can become so vivid in our collective imagination that it shapes what researchers focus on, and can ultimately even help bring that future into being. This was true of ideas about artificial intelligence long before conversational AI entered everyday life, and Wilson believes the same is true of the dangers of AI and the confusion surrounding biotechnology.

By grounding his future scenarios in real laboratory visits and staying close to ‘hard’ science, Wilson isn't simply fantasising about what's possible. He wants to carefully intervene in what he calls the social imaginary: the shared ideas and stories about what the future can, and should, look like.

Even so, Wilson doesn't claim to predict the future: “No single artist's practice can, on its own, determine the trajectory of a technology with consequences as far-reaching as synthetic biology. But by producing ‘seeds’ of possible worlds rather than closed-off stories, and by treating those seeds as provisional prototypes rather than final conclusions, I want to give viewers the chance to imagine, and rehearse what it might mean to live alongside technologies that are already quietly entering our lives.”

Written by Paulien Dresscher

Want to Know More?

• Portfolio and work by Matthew C. Wilson
• Factitious Flora (experimental film)
• His fellowship on AI, synthetic biology and film at NIAS