Into the Inferno
As Mat Collishaw’s Inferno is staged at Southbank Centre this month, he explains why he has brought climate change into his art, and describes how his visualisation of the crisis is inspired both by Dante’s 700-year-old The Divine Comedy and today’s AI technology
How did the Inferno project come about?
In 2011, I collaborated on an installation with Ron Arad at London’s Roundhouse, creating a toxic tropical environment, with nature mutating out of control. Fifteen years on, I was invited to make something in a similar format for La Seine Musicale in Paris I looked into different concepts and tried to find the appropriate music. The idea of Dante’s The Divine Comedy came to me – his journey into Hell (the Inferno). I discovered that Liszt had written the Dante Symphony, based on The Divine Comedy. It's not often performed, but is an incredible piece – emotionally turbulent and very dramatic, so it lends itself to stirring imagery. Remarkably for the time, Liszt had wanted the premiere in 1857 to be an immersive experience, with huge wind machines and projections of Bonaventura Genelli’s paintings of The Divine Comedy. That never happened, but I thought we could bring a version of his original vision to life today.
What attracted you to Dante’s Divine Comedy?
I’ve been creating artworks that reference climate change, genetic manipulation and our interference with the natural world since the 1990s. Dante’s vision of Hell works as a metaphor for how we’ve neglected and abused our environment through hubris, gluttony and greed. His Purgatory could be compared to our fumbling attempts to make good the destruction we’ve wreaked, with solar panels, wind turbines, carbon capture and genetic engineering – solutions that seem to offer penitence. However, this contrition is often compromised by moral opportunism. I read something likening this to Catholic indulgences. As soon as there’s an attempt to make good, someone will find a way to exploit it. It’s clearly problematic that many companies use public subsidies to appear more green, although they’re not genuinely committed – it’s greenwashing, a fashionable ruse to gain traction with more customers.
What were the first steps of your creative process?
I listened to the symphony over and over, trying to understand how it unfolds, and at the same time read the original text and listened to lectures, researching The Divine Comedy and looking for resonances. I started laying out a timeline in editing software, using the symphony and dropping in footage from video libraries – of forests, floods, mounds of plastic waste – to create an order that reflected the poem, making the rhythm of the symphony work with the footage. When that was mapped out, I started creating my own versions of this stock footage imagery.
What are the key moments in the film of Inferno?
We begin in a forest and steadily travel forwards until we reach a huge forest fire. Then we progress through melting ice caps in Hell. There are other aspects: like Charon, the old ferryman who transports the souls of the dead; a role here occupied by displaced asylum seekers. In the original Divine Comedy, Purgatory ends with an ascent to Paradise. We finish the film ascending the Shard in London, the tallest building in the UK – possibly a monument to hubris, an attempt to reach Heaven.
The symphony is surrounded by other music – did you choose those pieces?
I wanted to begin with a single voice – humanity singing against the darkness. Matthew Swann at BBC Concert Orchestra suggested O Quam Mirabilis Est by Hildegard of Bingen, which felt exactly right: a call from an ancient mystic. Alongside this, I use a film of an iris flower, burning yet unconsumed by the flames – a motif of solace, of enduring persecution through faith.
To link this to the Liszt, I looked for something simple that would evoke nature and our malign influence upon it, and found Couperin’s Le Rossignol en amour, a piece of disarming innocence. On a small screen above the orchestra, a bird appears, chained to a bar. We built it in a game engine so that it can respond to the live flute, as if singing the flute line itself. Later, another bird splashes in a toxic puddle, accompanying Messiaen’s Concerto for L’Oiseau. Taken together, these elements begin to suggest a quietly troubling relationship with the natural world. It then goes into the Inferno, which is projected on the large screen at the front of stage.
I wanted the audience to leave feeling moved and galvanised, so we needed something after the Liszt. Artist and Rapper TaliaBle appears as Mother Earth, performing over sampled fragments of the symphony. It unfolds as a breakup: she has loved and nurtured her partner, only to be neglected, abused and exploited – and now she wants rid of him.
How do you hope the audience will respond?
I want the evening to be thought-provoking, and for its ideas to resonate. I hope it encourages people to reflect on The Divine Comedy and the hell we’ve built on Earth, and to engage with what is ultimately an existential issue. There are many crises, but managing the climate is central. I’d like it to feel like an exciting challenge, rather than a source of guilt, which too easily alienates. The appeal of figures like Trump in the US, or Reform in the UK, reflects a resistance to being lectured. People need to be engaged, not admonished.
There may be a dissonance in confronting something troubling within an experience that is, in itself, beautiful. I hope that presenting it like this, with content and craftsmanship working together with the music – the piece remains uplifting and lyrical, carrying the audience with it.
How does video alter the experience of a concert?
When I go to a classical concert I’m listening to the music, watching a violinist or cellist, or the horn section, and trying to understand and appreciate it. This means I’m thinking about what I should be experiencing, rather than just enjoying it. I find it easier when there’s something to watch on a screen. The music starts doing its work. I’m not thinking so hard so I can go with the flow of the music and become immersed in it. This might sound like sacrilege, because it’s not the ‘normal’ way to experience a concert, but everything is up for grabs. Who makes the rules about how we should experience music?
How do you relate your visuals to the music?
I often make the visuals work against the tone of the music. For example, in sweet, lyrical pieces, I might have plastic bags floating underwater – the ugly but balletic sight of an undulating shape catching the light. Or there’s a moment in Inferno that’s almost like a waltz, for which I found a clip of an oil refinery belching out smoke. I couldn’t make it work until I found a way to orbit the camera as if the viewer is waltzing. The juxtaposition of the waltz and the refinery belching smoke is absurd, but somehow it works. It’s never as literal as having dark footage against dark music.
Where are the creative boundaries between you and the AI?
Using AI, the craftsmanship is the same as it would be with any other media, whether it’s clay or painting. My choice was to either go out with a camera and drone to film oil refineries and floods, or to take imagery from stock libraries, but both pipelines are problematic, so the most effective solution was to use an AI video generation tool. I have worked hard to understand how different AI applications operate and I work across a wide range of them. The key thing is crafting the prompt to get what you want. Currently the maximum length of a generated clip is only 10 seconds and some of my sequences last several minutes so there is also a lot of time spent blending and extending clips using a variety of techniques.
AI introduces a random element that you can ignore or nurture and work with. I enjoy that. Often you don’t want these surprises, but sometimes they work. Leonardo da Vinci used to recommend young artists to throw a dirty sponge at a wall and then imagine a landscape or battle in the stain, creating something figurative from this random act. With abstract expressionist painting, or process painting, you might throw a can of paint at your canvas and let it drip and then work with the results, so there is often a degree of randomness in the artistic process. Once I have what I need from the AI, I reshape it, so the creative control ultimately remains mine.
How do you rationalise the fact that AI consumes a lot of energy and water?
This is a difficult and important question. The energy involved in my process is likely far lower than that required for a conventional film production, with crews, lighting, transport and logistics. In that sense, it can be a more energy-efficient approach. A significant proportion of AI’s energy use lies in training large models, which is far more intensive than inference. By comparison, generating images or video tends to be relatively modest, though still not negligible. It does consume energy and water through data centres, but it is not necessarily greater than other common digital activities, such as gaming or large-scale data storage.
AI may also play a role in addressing environmental challenges. It is already being used to optimise energy systems, including the distribution and transmission of electricity, and to balance supply and demand on renewable grids. It can improve weather and climate modelling, helping to predict extreme events, and is being applied in agriculture to reduce water use, fertiliser and pesticide inputs through more precise monitoring. In conservation, AI is used to track wildlife populations and detect illegal deforestation, while in industry it can optimise manufacturing processes to reduce waste and emissions. We are unlikely to meet climate targets without tools of this kind.
At the same time, emissions continue to rise, and demand for materials such as concrete, steel and glass – essential for infrastructure like hospitals and schools – is not going away. Technologies such as small modular nuclear reactors could play a significant part of the solution, though they remain controversial. There are no simple answers, but I think we need to engage more openly with the scale and complexity of the problem, rather than dismissing certain technologies outright before properly considering their potential role.
How do you feel about AI relying on the creative efforts of others?
Art has always depended on cross-fertilisation. Someone sees someone else’s work, copies a little, and takes it forward. That’s the way the world works. Everything evolves through borrowing, stealing or copying. AI not going away – its use is only going to accelerate. I’ve read that ever since humanity invented bureaucracies we are essentially dealing with artificially intelligent systems that are procedural, rigid and indifferent. Anyone who has got a parking ticket for dropping a child at school and parking sensibly for three minutes will have experienced the absurdity of this. You are essentially dealing with an unreasonable algorithm. There are also plenty of artists, writers and musicians making material that might as well have been generated by one.
At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy for artists who feel their work has been absorbed into these systems without credit or consent. It is only fair that people should have some agency over how their work is used and that frameworks exist to recognise and compensate that contribution. I don’t want work that feels formulaic or predetermined. I think it’s crucial that these tools are directed by people. I want to experience humanity coming through an artwork, to feel someone has thoughts and experiences transcending whatever tools they may have used to create the work.
Mat Collishaw’s Inferno is staged at Queen Elizabeth Hall on 29 April as part of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes Festival
