The French artist Pierre Huyghe embraces site-specific work to discover the boundaries between humanity, nature and the artificial. Over the previous decade, Huyghe has created outside sculptures that included lively bee colonies and “scanned” a Norwegian forest to generate an ongoing, cinematic narrative about an actual place. Huyghe planted a backyard with hallucinogenic and carnivorous vegetation and reworked a skating rink right into a watery, earthen surroundings. Now, for his largest exhibition thus far, the artist returns to an institutional setting. He honours its constraints as he reconsiders the probabilities and limitations of synthetic intelligence (AI)and machine sentience.
Liminal is unfold throughout the large, 3,500 sq. m area at Punta della Dogana. The presentation is organised by the unbiased curator Anne Stenne, who has labored with Huyghe since 2014 and views Liminal as the start of a brand new cycle for the artist. “Normally the positioning triggers the fiction that may unfold and create the situation for the work to exist,” Stenne says. “Right here, he brings the fiction to the positioning.”
Liminal options over a dozen works, together with 5 new items. The supplies inform a narrative of evolving applied sciences: earlier works embrace aquariums, dwell marine ecosystems and movie, whereas more moderen items are fabricated from “robotics pushed by machine studying” with voices and edits generated by AI. Sensors abound all through Liminal, integrating real-time details about guests and the area into the present’s evolving presentation.
People meet non-humans
The exhibition title, Stenne says, suggests “a passage between the smart actuality wherein we live—or Pierre is giving entry to—and the inhuman or non-human entities that inhabit the exhibition.” The human and non-human step by step impression on one another because the present unfolds.
Liminal, the eponymous work of the present, is a real-time simulation-on-film that resembles a feminine physique with a void as a substitute of a head. In the course of the exhibition, Liminal’s subjectivity will shift in accordance with inputs from environmental elements—the climate, for instance, and the presence of holiday makers. AI will inform how the simulation develops, in addition to information extracted from an artificial mind organoid developed in a lab at New York’s Rockefeller Middle. Liminal will have the ability to really feel ache, Stenne says, not as people do “once we burn ourselves”, however as “a plant will change orientation as a result of it doesn’t wish to burn within the solar”.
Two different new works, provisionally titled Inexistants and Idiom, use AI to completely different ends. Inexistants is a movie with out starting or finish, edited in actual time by AI. It depicts a mysterious ritual round an unburied skeleton in Chile’s harsh Atacama Desert, with robotic arms performing what is likely to be funeral rites. Idiom is a brand new language, unintelligible by people, which AI will produce over the course of the present. Mute human carriers will flow into with golden LED display masks, which seize info and combine it into the brand new “idiom”.
The French thinker Jean-François Lyotard requested, “can thought go on with out a physique?” Huyghe explores what it means to exist in a second earlier than humanisation, earlier than domestication and grownup consciousness. His works could give us richer understandings of that state.
• Pierre Huyghe: Liminal, Punta della Dogana, Dorsoduro 2, till 24 November
