CRITIC’S PICK
Pierre Huyghe Reads Our Minds, and Discovers a New Art Form
In a commanding new exhibition at London’s Serpentine Galleries, the French artist makes images directly from brain activity — and adds 10,000 flies for good measure.
LONDON — You wake up from a vivid dream, but find it’s gone by daylight; you see something beautiful or surprising in the morning, but can’t describe it fully by afternoon. What if you could just download your thoughts into images, without the intercession of memory or language? The French artist Pierre Huyghe wondered too, and his new exhibition here, made with the help of some ambitious neuroscientists and some nifty technology, suggests what the images in our heads might look like. Mr. Huyghe has always been a cerebral artist, but his new show here is cerebral in a literal way — generated from consciousness itself.
Mr. Huyghe’s exhibition “Uumwelt,” which opened last week at the Serpentine Galleries in London’s stately Kensington Gardens, offers something uncommon in an art setting: a wholly new kind of imagery. The artist collaborated with Japanese scientists who can translate M.R.I. scans into pictures, and the resultant, restless impressions of brain activity mutate and pullulate from frame to frame. The screens here have their own kind of life, and as you spend longer in the Serpentine’s dimmed galleries the very boundaries between images and humans (and other living creatures) start to dissolve.
Anyone who cares about the future of either art or neuroscience should see this commanding show, which, like all the best science fictions, offers equal amounts of hope and fright. It represents a return to the controlled spaces of museums after some of Mr. Huyghe’s acclaimed recent environmental projects, like his transformation of an abandoned German skating rink into a posthuman ecosystem at last year’s Münster Sculpture Project, though this new show, too, is a living garden in its own way.
At the Serpentine, Mr. Huyghe — it’s pronounced WEEG, one syllable, silent H — has shaded the skylights, busted up some walls, and installed five free-standing LED screens on which images flicker past, dozens of times per second. The images are fuzzy and jerky, often in a Gustonish palette of pinks and reds and grays, and for fleeting milliseconds they seem to depict objects or animals against a plain white background. But they never stay put for long. The images spawn bulbous deformations, then transform again. (A soft, clicking ambient score provides a beat, and links the work to Mr. Huyghe’s early videos backed by musique concrète; the walls have been sanded down to reveal earlier paint jobs, and sawdust scents the rooms.)
These images were not made with a camera; what we are looking at are endless frantic attempts to render human thoughts into visual form. Mr. Huyghe collaborated with the neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani, whose lab at Kyoto University has developed artificial intelligence software that decodes human brain activity and renders it as images. In Kyoto Mr. Huyghe had participants enter an M.R.I. scanner and look at pictures or think about ideas; then he used Mr. Kamitani’s software to represent the neural activity. The artist has retouched these products of consciousness only slightly; the images I have seen from Mr. Kamitani’s lab appear nearly identical to stills of Mr. Huyghe’s videos.
They are perplexing to watch, but engrossing. On the first screen I thought I saw a chick or a frog taking shape, though the creature would palpitate into an egg, a lumpen lime or a blastula of germinating cells. The screen in the Serpentine’s western gallery appeared to depict a nude of unknown gender; I thought I saw a bra at several points before it blistered for milliseconds at a time. The most abstract of the screens has the appearance of a blurred Gerhard Richter seascape at moments, while the most solidly representational of them oscillates between a Pomeranian puppy and that creepy kid’s toy known as Furby.
The images are never complete, in a perpetual process of becoming — and that may be the most human, and disconcerting, thing about them. Many artists today are exploring artificial intelligence, but imagistic expressions of AI in the gallery have been largely trite, relying far too much on received appearances from the video game developers of Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. Mr. Huyghe’s flickering screens, by anxious contrast, have the breath of life. What we are looking at is 100 dogs, 1,000 seascapes, formed pixel by pixel out of the human brain and an ever-growing database.
Mr. Huyghe shot to prominence in the late 1990s, alongside his Parisian colleagues Philippe Parreno and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, with a series of videos and performances that revealed the subtle workings of narrative and ideology in contemporary media. In works like “The Third Memory” (2000) and “Streamside Day Follies” (2003), the artist choreographed scenarios for performers or participants, who would then be free to behave as they wished within his scheme. He would carry through this half-defined, half-open technique in his later environments; now he devises complex collections of living and dead elements, which propagate and transform over time without the artist’s intervention. At the Münster skating rink, algae blossomed in standing pools, peacocks strutted about, and human cancer cells metastasized in an incubator.
Ants and bees, an adorable dog and even a mysterious albino penguin have played a critical role in these installations, chosen because animals behave in ways the artist cannot control. Here at the Serpentine, Mr. Huyghe has unleashed some 10,000 flies into the galleries, seen resting on the screens or lying dead under your feet. The museum itself becomes a living, mutating ecosystem, and even the images on the screens are modified throughout the day, triggered by sensors that respond to temperature and humidity. Note the exhibition’s title, “Uumwelt”: the German word for “environment” rendered, like the neuroscientific images here, with a stutter.
What makes the Serpentine show such a landmark is that it fuses the strains of Mr. Huyghe’s art — the earlier media strain and the later ecological strain — in a fashion that feels utterly contemporary. He has never given up on images during the environmental phase of his career; his lugubrious “Untitled (Human Mask),” completed in 2014, was a relatively straightforward narrative film that tracked a monkey in post-tsunami Fukushima. Yet here at the Serpentine, images themselves have a biological character that makes them more than mere representations of ecological change. The pictures are themselves “alive,” biotic, reacting to stimuli and growing in sophistication, and the show thus comprises a grand assemblage of real and artificial intelligences: the Japanese participants and the lab’s software, the flies’ little brains and our big ones. You begin to understand, as Mr. Huyghe’s brain scans wash over you, how images are part of the environment and climate is a kind of culture.
Critics aren’t supposed to have favorite artists. We’re supposed to look without favor, to come to passionate conclusions through dispassionate observation. But I can’t deny that Mr. Huyghe, for two decades now, has been the artist I trust most to forge a new art out of our present media chaos and ecological degradation. (I do think he took a wrong turn around 2010 with “The Host and the Cloud,” his overwrought 3-hour film with rutting Parisiennes and the Trix bunny, and the boulders and trilobites he placed on the roof of the Met in 2015 were an underwhelming cop-out.) I have checked my gut a lot this week as I’ve contemplated these freakish moving images, asking myself where the border lies between science and art and whether I cut him too much slack.
And what I come back with, still, is that “Uumwelt” is a breakthrough of immense importance, because it both charts a path forward for artists and universalizes the act of artistic creation. Early on in “The Lives of the Artists,” the foundational text of Renaissance art history, Giorgio Vasari explains that a great artist does not accurately reproduce the world, but draws forth images da se, “from himself,” in an act of skilled imagination. What Mr. Huyghe has proved — confoundingly, thrillingly — is that artistic creation could be a general tendency, not even limited to our own species, if we provided everyone the right tools. Those flies buzzing about, whose compound eyes can see Mr. Huyghe’s flickering screens four times more clearly than we can, could have their own museum exhibition soon.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Mind Reader Finds a New Art Form. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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