Dear users, this is a warm reminder from the FT Chinese website: If you are interested in more content on the FT Chinese website, please search for “FT Chinese website” in the Apple App Store or Google App Market and download the FT Chinese website. Official app.
In the arid, ancient Atacama Desert of Chile, a mysterious ritual is taking place. A group of machines surround a skeleton, shoveling sand slowly and clumsily. Sometimes they seem to be picking up objects next to the skeleton, they also seem to be performing surgery on the skeleton, or they are helping the skeleton complete a funeral.
The site used by astronomers to study extrasolar planets now presents a puzzling stage. The interaction between the lifeless body and the lifeless skeleton is taking place in front of everyone’s eyes.
This is a video work called “Camata” in French artist Pierre Huyghe’s solo exhibition “Liminal” at the Punta della Dogana in Venice. “Liminal” is Huyghe’s largest retrospective exhibition held in Europe in the past ten years. More than half of the works on display are works from 2024. “Camata” was shot in the desert over the course of five days earlier this year, constantly editing itself under the supervision of artificial intelligence, and seems to be a glimpse into a distant post-human future.
From the desert to the exhibition space, the film endlessly edits itself based on what is perceived and captured. As the machine learns from what’s going on around it, the viewer also helps navigate between different realities, between inanimate machines and inanimate skeletons.
Camata, 2024, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper, TARO NASU© Pierre Huyghe
Huyghe creates in the same way that I loved mixing different drinks together as a child, full of curiosity and exploration. While the results may not always be satisfactory, the experiment itself is exciting. Huyghe was not a fanatical scientist, but he was like a magician, mixing different media together to create unexpected effects.
Huyghe’s long-standing concerns include the cycles of nature, non-human intelligence and the complexity of forms of communication. In his works, animals and plants are often juxtaposed with machines, artificial intelligence, soil, stones and other non-living things, forming a wonderful symbiotic relationship. In this way, Huyghe explores the contradiction between our understanding of the world and the truth of the world itself.
In Halls 3 and 4 of the exhibition, the artist carefully created multiple small ecosystems, which were displayed in aquariums. In one of the aquariums, a hermit crab carried a strange “shell” on its back. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a replica of the famous sculpture “Sleeping Muse” created by Romanian artist Constantin Brâncusi in 1910, made from a resin cast. (Note: Title of work: Zoodram 5 (after ‘Sleeping Muse’ by Constantin Brancusi 2011))
Huyghe likes to blur the boundaries between art and the ecological environment. In addition to letting hermit crabs carry muse shells, he also let a honeycomb grow on the head of a nude reclining sculpture in the 2012 Documenta. In his solo exhibition in Venice, he attempted to expand this vague intention and bridge the gap between ecological environment and simulated reality.
The exhibition has nine exhibition halls, almost all of which have no lighting. Visitors must slow down and explore the unknown in a space with low recognition rate. Otherwise, they are likely to miss the works or even trip over them.
For example, there is a ground sculpture “Estelarium” made of basalt in the first exhibition hall. The word “Estelarium” cannot be found in the dictionary. The sculpture itself is like the belly mark of a pregnant woman before giving birth, a blank space for the life that is about to appear. . In the same exhibition room as “Estelarium” is the exhibition’s title work “Liminal”. In the English dictionary, the definition of “liminal” is “between or belonging to two different places.” Huyghe’s “Liminal” is a simulated human figure generated on a large screen. It has no face and is in a blank space. It seems to be “between or belonging to” a world with consciousness and another unknown non-human existence. Several people wearing masks that looked like Martians also entered and exited the exhibition hall from time to time. They remain silent and move through the different exhibition halls like moving monitors. Sometimes there are some strange sounds that suddenly appear in the exhibition hall. To ordinary people, these sounds may be meaningless. This is because they are new languages that gradually generate themselves during the exhibition. The name of this work is “Idiom”, but it is difficult for people to distinguish what kind of mask “Idiom” (idiom, dialect) is for countless advanced sensors? Or someone wearing a mask? Or a self-generated new language?
Liminal, 2024, Courtesy of the artist, and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper, and TARO NASU © Pierre Huyghe
As an artist, Huyghe would not tell the answers because he was the kind of artist who liked to ask questions but rarely gave answers. However, he explained that the Bottega-designed masks worn by the “Idiom” have sensors on them that can capture and analyze everything that happens in the exhibition hall. Data such as people’s conversations, temperature, air humidity, and air pressure will continue to accumulate over time, and evolve into an unknown and evolving language through artificial intelligence and machine learning. Due to the high sensitivity of the sensors, they can capture information that cannot be expressed in human language or even that the human body cannot sense. This new language will be able to develop a vocabulary with more words than humans can, including knowledge of things that humans cannot perceive or even understand. Although this vocabulary is learned in our real world, this ineffable language seems to come from another reality due to its superhuman learning ability.
In his 2012 exhibition “Uumwelt” at the Serpentine Gallery, Huyghe showed people images connected to an FMRI machine, capturing their thoughts and projecting them directly onto a large screen. At the beginning of the 20th century, Jakob von Uexküll, a German biologist of Estonian descent, proposed a concept “Umwelt” about animal sentience. Umwelt means “subject world” in German. This concept holds that the subject world is covered by the perception of living beings. Since the sensory organs, methods, and scopes of species are different, in the same world, different life forms can build different main worlds. In a sense, Huyghe’s set of works is an extension of von Uxkul’s concept of the subjective world. It explores how sensors and artificial intelligence develop their own subjective world, and proposes to get rid of the human-centered conceit and explore the wisdom of all things. In 2021, at the “After Uumwelt” exhibition in Arles, Huyghe used a 3D printer to rematerialize these mental images and create living and non-living sculptures, one of which was exhibited together with a mobile thinking screen.
Uumwelt—Annlee, 2018-2024, Courtesy of the artist, and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper, TARO NASU© Kamitani Lab/Kyoto University and ATR©Pierre Huyghe
Huyghe emphasized that he did not know what “nature” meant, nor could he explain what “humanity” was. “Until we have a clear definition of what ‘nature’ means when we use these two words, there is no answer. What does it mean? What does it encompass? From what point of view? If you are in the Amazon rainforest Ask locals what nature is and they will give you another answer. What is human is also a complicated question. Does human refer to ‘Homo Sapiens’? Or does it refer to our domestication of ourselves?”
To a certain extent, Huyghe’s video “Human Mask” completed in 2014 is an interrogation of the two concepts of “humanity” and “domestication”.
At the beginning of the film, a drone camera captured the desolation caused by the 2011 tsunami in Fukushima. Then the camera moved indoors. Due to the dim light, there seemed to be a little girl sitting in front of a sink. , when the camera gradually got closer, it was discovered that it was actually wearing a wig and a smooth, white mask similar to that worn by Japanese Noh actors. The monkey sometimes plays with his wig, sometimes stares out the window in a daze, sometimes he is busy shuttling between the empty kitchen and dining room, taking out hand towels from the kitchen refrigerator and putting them on the dining table, as if he is entertaining a group of disappearing customers. This monkey is actually a waiter in a restaurant in Japan. Huyghe imagined that after the man-made environment in which it worked was destroyed, would the monkey continue to maintain the behavior it had been tamed by humans?
Human Mask, 2014, Pinault Collection. Courtesy of the artist; Hauser & Wirth, London; Anna Lena Films, Paris © Pierre Huyghe
“Human Mask” does not provide any answers. The rain outside the window is still falling, and the monkey is still wandering around his workplace. The last shot stays on the monkey’s eyes hidden behind the mask. In the silent room, the monkey’s eyes are Moving quickly, what does it see? I remembered what Huyghe once said: “I am not showing someone something. I am showing someone something, and this something may be human or non-human.” (『I』m not exhibiting something to someone. I』m exhibiting someone to something, and this something, maybe human or nonhuman.」
Huyghe’s exhibition explores the boundaries between existence and reality, fiction and non-fiction. Are only things that are actually visible real? Can the language generated in “Idiom” break this limitation? Are products from non-knowledge areas authentic? Can machines help liberate people from their narrow sense of existence?
Humanity is going through a crisis in the process of self-shaping. Is our definition of “human” still strong? Or will it enter a process of transformation? And is it possible to create the ability of sensory displacement in this process? Human beings may not be able to explain these questions at present, but the concepts derived from them seem to be coming to us from the future in the form of art.
(This article only represents the author’s personal views, editor’s email: [email protected])
