Symbiotic Traces: An Ecological Record of Language Model Training

What would it mean to visualize a language model’s training process in the vocabulary of a crisis it will never be able to feel? Symbiotic Traces pairs fifty stages of the OLMo 3 32B pretraining run with climate terms drawn from IPCC reports and Earth system science, then with original steam-printed marigold petals. AI interprets deterministic rules to assign each climate term, while the physical chemistry of botanical printing shapes each final image. With creative agency distributed across machine, artist, and material process, the product is a visual language for a model under construction.