In German the word ‘umwelt’, which means ‘environment’, also denotes the unique sensory world of a given organism. The extra ‘U’ in the title of Pierre Huyghe’s latest exhibition is no typo: given his longstanding interest in AI and machine learning, it’s a deliberate glitch. If all species experience their surroundings differently, how might an artificial consciousness make sense of the world? Screens planted throughout MoMA’s sculpture garden broadcast the outcomes of an experiment in which Huyghe asked a subject to picture a series of images, had the subject’s brain activity recorded by an fMRI scanner and prompted an artificial neural network to translate the data into images the subject may have pictured (1 July–29 November). The results seem alien, yet are based partly on simulations of cancer-cell mutations. Which might lead someone to wonder: do images generated by AI proliferate or metastasise?
Find out more from MoMA’s website.
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