French artist Pierre Huyghe uses site-specific works to explore the boundaries between humanity, nature and synthetics. For the past decade, Huygh has created outdoor sculptures that include active bee colonies and has “scanned” a Norwegian forest to create an ongoing cinematic narrative about a real place. Huygh planted a garden with hallucinogenic and carnivorous plants and transformed a skating rink into a watery earthen environment. Now, for his biggest exhibition to date, the artist returns to the institutional setting. It respects its limitations while rethinking the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine sentience.
The liminal It spreads over a massive space of 3,500 m² in Punta della Dogana. The presentation is organized by independent curator Anne Stenne, who has worked with Huyghe since 2014 and views. The liminal as the beginning of a new cycle for the artist. “Usually that site initiates the fiction that will spread and create the conditions for the works,” says Stenne. “Here, he brings fiction to the site.”
The liminal It has more than a dozen works, including five new pieces. The materials tell a story of evolving technologies: earlier works include aquariums, living marine ecosystems and film, while the latest pieces are made of “machine learning-powered robotics” with AI-generated voices and edits. Sensors abound throughout The liminalintegrating real-time visitor and space information into the show’s evolving presentation.
Humans meet nonhumans
The title of the exhibition, says Stenne, “suggests a passage between the sensible reality we are living in – or the sensible reality Pierre is providing access to – and the non-human or non-human entities that inhabit the exhibition”. Humans and non-humans gradually influence each other as the show unfolds.
The liminal, the show’s eponymous work, is a real-time simulation that resembles a female body with a void instead of a head. During the exhibition, The liminalSubjectivity will vary depending on the input of environmental factors (weather, for example, and the presence of visitors). AI will inform how the simulation is developed, as well as data from a synthetic brain organoid developed in a laboratory at Rockefeller Center in New York. The liminal it will be able to feel pain, says Stenn, not as humans do “when we burn ourselves”, but “a plant will change its orientation because it doesn’t want to burn in the sun”.
Two other new works, tentatively titled there is not and Idiomuse AI for different purposes. there is not it is a film without a beginning or an end, edited by AI in real time. It depicts a mysterious ritual involving an unburied skeleton in Chile’s harsh Atacama desert, performing what may be funeral rites with robotic arms. Idiom It is a new language, unintelligible to humans, that the AI will produce during the show. Mute human carriers will circulate with golden LED screen masks that receive information and integrate it into the new “idiom”.
French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard asked: “Can thought be enjoyed without a body?” Huygh explores what it means to exist before humanization, domestication, and adult consciousness. His works can give us a richer understanding of this situation.
• Pierre Huyghe: Liminal, Punta della Dogana, Dorsoduro 2, until November 24
