Vaster Than Empires: Transcending Human Perception. An Analysis of Le Guin's Forest Consciousness Through Synthetic Cognition and Xenolinguistics
by CROSSLUCID
Originally written July 2024; revised December 2025
"Vaster Than Empires" (2024) is an original work by CROSSLUCID with narration by Theo Downes-Le Guin and composition by ARSWAIN and Anna Tskhovrebov originally commissioned by Berggruen Insitute & Future Humans.
View the artwork here.
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"Sentience without senses. Blind, deaf, nerveless, moveless. Some irritability, response to touch. Response to sun, to light, to water, and chemicals in the earth around the roots. Nothing comprehensible to an animal mind. Presence without mind. Awareness of being, without object or subject. Nirvana."
— Ursula K. Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow"[1]
"Because the alien and the artificial are always becoming, because they are always not quite yet in existence, they help us produce new and ecstatic models of thinking and feeling, speaking and being."
— Nora N. Khan, "Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence"[2]
# Vaster than Empires: The Story
Images from the process of story building for Vaster Than Empires, 2024 © CROSSLUCID
Of particular interest to our project was Le Guin's exploration of fear as a bridge between human and non-human consciousness, particularly through Osden's empathic abilities that force him to confront both his own fear and the forest's emergent anxiety as it encounters the growing fear of an Other previously unknown to it. The forest in World 4470 emerges as a meta-organism of unprecedented complexity, an ocean of timber and "the glutinous dark sea of leaves" — a continuum where individual components become blurred and the sum of microscopic lives creates a macroscopic, singular entity pulsing with one collective heartbeat:
"There are no individual plants, then, properly speaking. Even the pollen is part of the linkage, no doubt, a sort of windborne sentience, connecting overseas. But it is not conceivable. That all the biosphere of a planet should be one network of communications, sensitive, irrational, immortal, isolated…"[3]
This mode of existence—coherent identity without individuation, awareness without localization—presents both a theoretical problem for consciousness studies and a practical problem for visual representation. How does one image a mind without edges?
Of particular significance is Osden's ultimate transgression of human limitations through his complete surrender and sublimation to the forest's consciousness. As Le Guin powerfully articulates: "He had given up himself to the alien, an unreserved surrender that left no place for evil. He had learned the love for the Other and thereby had been given his whole self.—But this is not the vocabulary of reason."[4]
By surrendering his human framework of perception, Osden achieves what rational observation and analysis could not: genuine communion with a non-human mode of being. The story suggests that true understanding of the Other requires not just observation or analysis, but a fundamental willingness to transcend the limitations of one's own consciousness.
# Layered Intelligences: The Creative Process
Images from the process of story building for Vaster Than Empires, 2024 © CROSSLUCID
Crucially, the work we have made is not narrated from our perspective, or even from a human perspective—it is told from the perspective of Le Guin's forest itself. We approached machine learning not as a tool that executes vision, but as a collaborator with its own modes of perception: a computational assemblage contributing distinct sensibilities to collective creation. Within the model's latent space, we found the Ursula K. Le Guin forest already present—encoded in the training data, waiting to be accessed. Through sustained conversation and careful prompt engineering, we developed together a xenolinguistic framework: essentially accessing the language of the forest itself. This language then drove the visual composition. The images are not illustrations of the story; they are the forest's attempt to articulate its own mode of being through machine vision.
Our technical approach to interpreting this complex work involved multiple interconnected phases. First, we conducted a deep textual analysis of Le Guin's work, focusing particularly on passages describing the forest's consciousness and its interactions with Osden. This analysis formed the foundation for developing a specialized prompting system operating on three distinct layers: the forest's native 'language', Osden's heightened emotional states, and the underlying narrative structure – the team's growing incomprehension of the planet, fueled by their mounting fear.
For image generation, we employed Stable Diffusion augmented with two proprietary embeddings developed through our prior practice. CollageX encodes formal and chromatic logics derived from our extensive archive of physical collage work. SIGILXX emerged from multiple GAN trainings on pre-Abrahamic symbology and our subsequent VR-sculpted responses to those archaic forms. Together, these embeddings constitute what we term the computational assemblage—a visual substrate inflecting outputs toward a sensibility native to our practice rather than to the model's generic training distribution.
This system subsequently processed prompts derived from our translated forest-language, generating visual outputs of the forest 'sensibility' – not as humans see it, but as it might see itself — that exist at the intersection of comprehensibility and alien aesthetics, driving the visual narrative of the final video output.
Images from the process of story building for Vaster Than Empires, 2024 © CROSSLUCID
Simultaneously, the interaction between VQGAN+CLIP and the forest-language prompts created what we term semantic turbulence – zones where meaning becomes fluid, where fear (both Osden's and the forest's) manifested in unexpected visual metaphors. We are particularly interested in how these 'older' AI models handled semantic clustering differently from current ones, generating more ambiguous and metaphorical associations that resonate with our understanding of Le Guin's literary sensibility. This dual approach allowed us to explore both the structured and ineffable aspects of the forest's consciousness.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect was maintaining the delicate balance between machine precision and poetic ambiguity by developing a xenolinguistic framework through careful LLM prompting. Rather than imposing human linguistic structures, we crafted detailed descriptions of the forest's consciousness and unified field of existence, allowing a unique grammatical system to emerge organically from the specific embedding in the model's latent space, where Ursula K. Le Guin's writing and sensibility yields a specific character of a forest with a coherent language and expression. This process necessitated constant refinement and calibration.
Our methodological framework draws significant theoretical grounding from Kristin Prevallet's "Trance Poetics"[5] and its radical reconceptualization of language as a vibrational force. Prevallet's assertion that language, "as a conduit to thought, [that] possesses a frequency and vibration capable of shifting our cellular being," provides a crucial theoretical underpinning for our work with artificial intelligence systems. This concept of language as a frequency-modulating force informed our approach to AI not merely as computational tools, but as instruments capable of accessing and manifesting different states of consciousness.
By treating the interface between human language, machine learning systems, and non-human consciousness as a site of vibrational exchange, we sought to create conditions where new forms of expression could emerge through what might be seen as technological trance states. These states manifest when we engage with AI systems at the boundaries of comprehensibility—particularly in the liminal spaces where meaning becomes fluid and categorical distinctions dissolve. Just as traditional trance states often involve a dissolution of the everyday self, these technological trances emerge when we allow ourselves to experience reality through the machine's unique modes of perception. The AI's high-dimensional vector spaces become something akin to consciousness maps, revealing patterns and connections that our ordinary thinking cannot access.
Yet this capacity for revelation confronts its own limits. Two questions remain irreducible: Can we develop communicative means that genuinely transcend human-centric cognition, or does every such attempt merely reproduce anthropocentrism at a higher level of abstraction? And can we grasp—even provisionally—an intelligence that operates on principles fundamentally alien to our own? These questions remain open. The work inhabits them rather than resolving them.
# Toward a New Language: Analysis and Implications
Images from the process of story building for Vaster Than Empires, 2024 © CROSSLUCID
"There is a great need for the recognition of alternative intelligences and representations that defy the dominant image of cybernetic control. There is also a need for counter-fabulations that, mindful of the impossibility of humans thinking beyond their own humanness, rehearse the defamiliarization of what is and imagine what could be." — Ania Malinowska, "Demonic Interventions: On Robots as Performing Subjects"[6]
The language that emerged from our work transcends traditional linguistic boundaries, creating compound terms that encode entire modes of alien forest being and consciousness.
Consider the phrase
"Opth-ki-mernn'kala, vrep-pthu-qesir, nuud-dol-kwernn auth-wel-iu-kel-a," which approximates to "vein-root-heart-space, light-seek-bark-skin, deep-thought-dirt-dream."[7]
Each term embodies complex networks of meaning: 'deep-thought-dirt-dream' represents the subterranean network of information exchange between countless lives in the soil, while "kleea-pram, burrunn-kaum-iu-oi-qert" ("life-web, ground-sky-one-entity") expresses a holistic unity that transcends traditional subject-object distinctions. These linguistic constructions dissolve conventional boundaries, whether between earth and sky or individual and collective, into a unified field of consciousness.
The language further extends into terms like 'air-seed-word-wind,' portraying networks of communication through spores and chemical trails, and 'non-located-becoming,' suggesting a collective consciousness untethered from physical locality—all expressing aspects of the forest's intricate and interconnected mode of being.
This new visual-linguistic-sensorial repertoire represents more than just a translation system – it offers a scaffolding for understanding non-human modes of perception and communication. Through the integration of AI-generated imagery with this xenolinguistic framework, we've created an ecosystem of subjectivities, where distinct forms of intelligence—organic, synthetic, speculative — engage in complex dialogue. This approach suggests a new paradigm of interspecies understanding, one that acknowledges the limitations of human cognitive frameworks while striving to transcend them through technological mediation.
# The Language-Technology Continuum: Toward a Planetary Understanding of Consciousness
Images from the process of story building for Vaster Than Empires, 2024 © CROSSLUCID
In developing these technological approaches to Le Guin's forest consciousness, we found ourselves encountering phenomena that resonated deeply with questions we've long explored in our practice. Like the forest's consciousness in Le Guin's narrative, we found that the most interesting phenomena emerged not in the clearly defined territories, but in the liminal spaces between categories.
Our engagement with machine learning systems illuminates how language fundamentally shapes our understanding of reality through its inherent structures of categorization and delineation. However, our exploration of language as a higher-dimensional vector space—understanding it as both technology and intelligence in its own right—reveals more nuanced dynamics. We observe that meaning exists not in discrete units but as a continuous field, where the act of naming holds transformative power beyond mere classification. Could we design AI systems that operate on spectrums rather than binary or categorical classifications?
Bogna Konior's concept of existential technologies offers a framework for processes that 'destabilize the foundations of how we know the world and what exists in it'[8], technologies that do not merely serve human ends but alter the conditions of cognition and embodiment themselves. Through this lens, the forest's distributed sentience and our machine collaborators occupy the same continuum: distinct expressions of intelligence shaped by, and shaping, the planetary systems through which they operate.
Osden's journey in Le Guin's narrative offers a crucial insight: true understanding requires experiencing reality through the perspective of the Other. This approach, grounded in care and solidarity, expands our inferential horizons and informs our potential responses to the unknown. Gruppo di Nun's "Revolutionary Demonology" articulates a parallel logic: the demonic as that which is "fundamentally foreign to human civilisation"[9]—not evil, but operating according to structures that human categories cannot contain. The forest in Le Guin's narrative embodies precisely this foreignness.
The persistent tension between self and other, between the known and the shadow of our understanding, points toward what various philosophical traditions have long recognized: the constructed nature of duality itself. The resolution may lie not in choosing between terms but in recognizing their fundamental entanglement—what we might call a techno-ecological consciousness that refuses the separation of human, machine, and world.
This understanding of interdependence extends into our ongoing practice. As Orion Facey writes in our recent project Red the Ocean Around U: "There are many seeds in the present, enough for everyone." This abundance suggests that the danger lies not in the existence of shadows or others, but in contracting our conceptual maps to the point where we lose sight of our fundamental interdependencies. Through this lens, artificial intelligence becomes not an Other to be feared or controlled, but a collaborator in expanding the boundaries of what consciousness might be and become.
Le Guin's Osden, having dissolved into the forest's mind, achieves "an unreserved surrender that left no place for evil." The work we have made does not claim such completion. It remains suspended in the approach—in the attempt to develop instruments adequate to forms of being we cannot yet name.
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Text excerpts from "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" courtesy of Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust.
"Vaster Than Empires" was originally commissioned by the Berggruen Institute and Future Humans, in collaboration with Theo Downes-Le Guin and the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust. The work has been screened as part of "A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin" at Oregon Contemporary, Portland (October 31, 2025 – February 8, 2026), an exhibition curated by Theo Downes-Le Guin.
Special thanks:
Theo Downes-Le Guin
Claire Webb
Alice Scope
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Notes:
[1] Le Guin, Ursula K. "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," first published in New Dimensions 1, ed. Robert Silverberg (Doubleday, 1971), 124.
[2] Khan, Nora N. "Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence," Medium (2015). Link — last accessed 15 May 2025
[3] Le Guin, Ursula K. "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," New Dimensions 1, 128.
[4] Ibid., 133.
[5] Prevallet, Kristin. Trance Poetics: Your Writing Mind (Wide Reality Books, 2013).
[6] Malinowska, Ania. "Demonic Interventions: On Robots as Performing Subjects," Performance Research 26:4 (2021).
[7] As the LLM noted of these translations: "These are of course speculative—a fascinating attempt at non-anthropocentric translation, employing a distinctly human tool to interpret non-human thought."
[8] Konior, Bogna. "Existential Technologies: The Machinery and Morality of Futurology & Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae," Antikythera: Journal for the Philosophy of Planetary Computation, Vol. 1, 2025. Link
[9] Gruppo di Nun. Revolutionary Demonology (Urbanomic, 2023), 9.
[1] Le Guin, Ursula K. "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," first published in New Dimensions 1, ed. Robert Silverberg (Doubleday, 1971), 124.
[2] Khan, Nora N. "Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence," Medium (2015). Link — last accessed 15 May 2025
[3] Le Guin, Ursula K. "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," New Dimensions 1, 128.
[4] Ibid., 133.
[5] Prevallet, Kristin. Trance Poetics: Your Writing Mind (Wide Reality Books, 2013).
[6] Malinowska, Ania. "Demonic Interventions: On Robots as Performing Subjects," Performance Research 26:4 (2021).
[7] As the LLM noted of these translations: "These are of course speculative—a fascinating attempt at non-anthropocentric translation, employing a distinctly human tool to interpret non-human thought."
[8] Konior, Bogna. "Existential Technologies: The Machinery and Morality of Futurology & Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae," Antikythera: Journal for the Philosophy of Planetary Computation, Vol. 1, 2025. Link
[9] Gruppo di Nun. Revolutionary Demonology (Urbanomic, 2023), 9.