By Henie Zhang
Pierre Huyghe’s Variants (2021—) does not occupy space; it perpetuates it. The work takes as its foundation a complete 3D scan and model of a small island at the bend of the Randselva River in Norway. Biologists and surveyors then furnished this model with quantitative and qualitative measurements of the island’s organic and inorganic elements, such as the types of species, the water levels, the trash, and the sounds and smells. Biochemical and physical sensors are installed around the island to track the shifts in the island’s environment and funnel them into an artificial neural network, which generates from all collected data a continuously evolving and mutating simulation of the island, unfolding in real time on the large LED screen at the far end of the island.
Pierre Huyghe, Variants, 2021-ongoing. Scanned forest, real-time simulation, generative mutations and sounds, intelligent camera, environmental sensors, animals, plants, micro-organisms and materialized mutations: synthetic and biological material aggregate. Courtesy of the artist; Kistefos Museum; Hauser and Wirth, London. Photo: Ola Rindal. © Pierre Huyghe.
The screen acts as a porous membrane between the two islands. Over time, mutations produced by the convolutions of the digital mind are re-introduced into the physical environment of the island. For example, bird calls around the island are picked up by microphones, passed through the neural network, and spliced back into the environment as distorted sounds played from speakers hidden behind the foliage. As one walks through the island, virtual or actual origins of all encounters become indistinguishable. A giant beehive droops from a tree branch, partly living, partly a gummy pink bulge. A large carcass of a reindeer—a species foreign to the region—lies among suspiciously sculptural bone forms. On the LED screen, we see a prone human body, foot caught in some kind of trap, that is nowhere to be found on the island itself. The periodic floods that intermittently render the island inaccessible deposit junk and machine parts leftover from the old wood pulp factory upstream. Those materials mingle among the other erratic growths and arrivals—all of which are absorbed by and regurgitated by the digital cortex. Many virtual and physical additions—at times a single stone—pass totally beneath notice.
Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt, Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, (3 October 2018 – 10 February 2019). Copyright Ola Rindal. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries
The French artist Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962) created Variants as the 50th contribution to the Kistefos Museum’s sculpture park, whose area encompasses the island. Like Variants, Huyghe’s corpus is never determined in space and time but composts their conditions in bizarre heaps. There is no particularity of meaning, a compact “read,” only fortuitous concatenations of human and nonhuman influences upon each other—in Huyghe’s own words, contingent “rhythms, automatisms, and accidents, invisible and continuous transformations.”
For UUmwelt (2018-19, Serpentine Gallery), Huyghe began by giving an individual a selection of images and descriptions. An fMRI scanner captured their brain activity as they processed and imagined those materials and gave the data to a deep neural network, which reconstructed them—with awkward, uncanny, and monstrous results—in combination with data from its own image bank. The resulting images are then exhibited on LED screens throughout the gallery, but the displays’ actual rhythms and visuals were constantly modified by the changing levels of light, humidity, temperature, motion, and even the gazes of visitors, as measured by sensors throughout the gallery. A community of flies lived, bred, and died in the gallery—analogous to the human visitors, who also “exist and then cease to exist within the exhibition”—and the walls were sanded down to produce piles of dust on the floor that the visitors then tracked out of the gallery. A Way in Untilled (2012, documenta 13) brought together psychoactive plants, a dog with a pink leg, a sculpture with a live bee hive as its head, and piles of bricks that evoke a construction site quietly void of construction. After Alife Ahead (2017, Skulptur Projekte Münster) disemboweled an abandoned skating rink to create a cratered desert, at the center of which is an aquarium which visibility is controlled by the cellular automata of a venomous sea snail’s shell. Such worlds—to paraphrase Huyghe himself—exhibit machine, animal, human, and the gallery environment to each other. They metabolize and reproduce each other in their particular furtive forms of thought, vision, action. If there is a “we” that Huyghe amplifies across his exhibitions, it is intimate yet often indifferent, infinitely cluttered, pervasive but already alien.
Pierre Huyghe: After ALife Ahead, 2017. Installation View, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Münster. Photo by Ola Rindal. Courtesy of the artist and kulptur Projekte Münster.
Inspired by Pierre Huyghe’s Variants
the habitat of drapery
By Henie Zhang
i.
i like being malfigured by safety
a nation of squares, some of them green
shrubbery
she played tennis there
her shadow it was a fence
ii.
make it hot but in a loose way
a jilted pink, dangling its aspects
a flamingo, color, earth
a vatic shapeliness a ring:
the i of the blind is also the i of light, is glass
she thought admiring the shrubbery
conduct its vigorous footage
its countervelvet
its seat
iii.
she searched for trees
to see birds in
her objective was simple:
cheap, thick birds
cut out of
monuments
she made a rope
to touch with
to touch that tree
it was a habitat of drapery when the light turned on:
a burnt, obsidian static
a dud pacific a string
iv.
sometimes i feel prepared
to touch
the centipedes
but if there is an edge we’re on then where is it
formed, the notion of it
she asked
sometimes, i make up a color
to see it
