V
A mutant landscape unfolds on the big screen: abandoned, rusted wrecks, pink swarms clustered on trees, and other strange organic growths emerging here and there along often flooded paths… A fascinating mise en abyme of the landscape and surrounding nature, but above all, of the perpetual metamorphosis of the living world. Work in progress The semi-organic, semi-digital installation implemented by Pierre Huyghe in the sculpture park of the Kistefos Museum in Norway shows us, beyond reality, the possibilities of reality modified by artificial intelligence.
Thus, in its fascinating mutant landscape entitled Variants, The artist blends reality and fiction with a virtuosity that unsettles our perception. Born from a true symbiosis between the living and the simulated, nature and its avatar – the moving and changing image generated in real time in situ –This digital landscape is displayed on a large screen installed in the middle of the trees, at the end of a path crossing one of those improbable places in Norway, situated between land and water, like a window open onto another world, a world in gestation, similar to the indeterminate world of dreams…
The fifty-first work created for the sculpture park of the incredible Kistefos museum in Jevnaker (north of Oslo), Pierre Huyghe's generative landscape stands out amidst the sculptures and installations of other artists such as Anish Kapoor, Claes Oldenburg, Olafur Eliasson, Jeppe Hein or Tony Cragg: captivating our gaze with its incessant and fascinating mutability, it seems to plunge us into another dimension, that of indeterminacy, taking us to the other side of the mirror, into an alternative reality.
Located below the park, on a previously inaccessible and frequently flooded island, the artwork blends the real and the virtual in a constant interaction. It presents a landscape and its digital simulacrum subjected to mutations generated in real time, randomly, by an "artificial intelligence" triggered by environmental sensors. Elements of the living world (sounds, movements, water fluctuations, etc.) thus alter the virtual world, before the latter, in turn, contaminates the real one: generative mutations of the digital landscape (continually transforming the scanned image of the site), resulting from 3D printing, mutated forms and unidentified creatures (sponge or metal growths, swarms, and denatured bones, etc.) emerge from the ground or cluster in the trees. These three-dimensional objects are themselves subject to the effects of time and temperature.
A disturbing extension of the real landscape via its digital avatar, of a physical environment (blending the living and the inert) through its artificially modified double, by the play of chance and the infinite metamorphoses inherent to the virtual world… simulating, in situ et in vivo, the possible variations of a living world that is itself constantly evolving…
By hybridizing this living world, alternately frozen, snowy, submerged… perpetually in motion, with its virtual metamorphoses reproduced in 3D to be aggregated with natural elements, V It implements a dual “self-generation”—that of the virtual by the living and that of the living by the virtual—in a constant, shifting movement, all the more unsettling for its unpredictability. While most of the “mutant expansions” implanted on the site can be considered artifacts, the same cannot be said of the bony growths aggregated with the skeleton of a reindeer lying and decomposing on the ground, and even less so of the bees that have colonized the artificial pink swarms suspended from branches…
When a Work in progress Transgressing, or rather annihilating, the boundaries between the real and the virtual, it allows us to see, with heightened attention due to the subversion of forms, reality as it is and as it could be…
“Variants” – Kistefos Museum of Contemporary Art
Samsmoveien 41, Jevnaker (Norway)
Until October 16
https://www.kistefosmuseum.com/news/pierre-huyghe-is-the-artist-of-the-year-2022
