CURA.

Pierre Huyghe : We can always try, though of course it’s a limitation, it’d be better to start by experiencing it.

PH: It was a commission for a permanent project. I found an island in the arm of a river which was previously inaccessible and thought it would be appropriate to construct something, or that events happening there would construct something, that could be experienced when crossing through it or along a pathway.

PH: Yes, it’s a crossing, the same thing could be said about Untilled at documenta. It’s an environment, more precisely a milieu, a constructed entity constituted by milieux. Untilled was a passage, that had been side-lined as it was an uncultivated compost-heap, where things were deposited. This island, covered by a forest, is downstream of a former paper factory and partly submerged when an electric dam releases its water. There are traces of past activity, bits of metal, pieces from machines, chunks of bricks. Several months a year it’s inaccessible, covered by snow or water. This milieu can be immersive or else it’s impenetrable. It has a rhythm.

PH: At certain moment it’s invisible to us, which doesn’t mean it isn’t generating something anew. Even before Variants, I was trying to give something a certain indifference and sensitivity, an existence without it being dependent on a gaze or the experience you may have of it.

PH: Exactly.

PH: Of course, a picture in a museum storeroom or a stone doesn’t need our eyes to exist, the word ‘exist’ here just means the process of entropy. The difference is that it won’t modify or generate something anew, unsupervised or unpredictable. This indifference, meanwhile, producing something new, makes explicit the separation. One way to break the subject/object asymmetry in the exhibition ritual, would be to give agency to the object, the possibility to not be remarkable, to be uninterpretable, or the capacity to be modified. Modify doesn’t mean change; a mechanic object changes position. Being modified implies a transformation, a metamorphosis, a plasticity, which is quite different. With a certain sensitive awareness of its environment an object shifts to a quasi-subject, an otherness that appears as it pleases. To come back to Variants, the rhythm of the water gave me a prompt for a speculative fiction. The island is an entity constituted of a milieu which is both biologic and algorithmic, physical and digital. One milieu is the given, the actual island covered by a forest, with living organisms: plants, animals, mushrooms, bacteria, and geological activities, minerals, chemical activities, water, etc. The other is what this island could be in an alternate reality, another possibility of itself. It is simultaneously both. How could the actual island host its possibility or how else it could manifest? This possibility takes the form of a live simulation. The simulation is affected by what it simulates, the given, and would affect it. There is a transfer of data going from one to another. The whole island was scanned to become the environment of the simulation, then an artificial neural network generates mutations from existing features present on the island. It’s a non-supervised learning process. The environment in the simulation is modified without control. At the end of the physical island, after crossing it, stands a daylight screen where the simulation is running. An intelligent camera goes around on its own in the simulation, activated by a set of parameters, it looks for change in things, sometimes forgets or get lost. Even when the island isn’t accessible, it keeps searching. It is a permanent work that has the capacity to be modified over time. Some of the digital mutations, randomly selected, exit the simulation and manifest in the physical space, contaminating the actual island by another possibility of itself.

PH: As the mutations in the simulation are volumetric, they are 3D printed using biological or synthetic materials. These artefacts, of fiction, of the algorithmic milieu are positioned in the physical island and at the same coordinate where they appear in the simulation. That’s the way it should work in time.

PH: No, aside the decay of the material.

PH: It is. The perpetual tension between machine learning which generates forms in the simulation and the data from sensors covering the whole island that capture in real time its unpredictable biochemical activity: water quality and level, temperature, sun exposition and seasons, living organism movements… All these variations modify what is generated. The artificial neural network generates mutations of already existing elements present on the island and the geo-biochemical events modify or inform these virtual mutations, giving them a form; a form of tension that manifest on the actual. Yet the contingency does not break the simulation’s generative rules, but counters predictability.

PH: At minima. With the instauration of something, to take Souriau’s concept, come different collaborators or different instances, companions, life forms, entities, and certain intelligences which have been constructed digitally, that could communicate. There are constructive disruptors of identity, which could change or eliminate some of the decisions I could make and introduce others.

PH: Yes, it brings contingency to Dream, which was written for a choreography by Merce Cunningham. I find interesting to accept unpredictability and let uncertainty enter the conception and actualization of something. Predictive models are used to ride the unknown; it’s quite boring. Simulation on the other hand plays with contingency in the actualization of something, it adapts its behaviors, as it has another time modality.

PH: To collaborate with humans and non-humans, machines, living organisms, and other means of knowledge and thought that alter and enrich the way something is conceived, during its formation and through its existence. To answer your question, there’s no one author but multi-subjectivities.

PH: I try to find the lowest common denominator in the place: from this a fiction is constructed. But prior to this opportunity, there are ideas or at least a set of desires, which sometimes find a context or don’t, unfortunately.

PH: It’s difficult to escape from certain patterns. I have been trying for several years to produce an entity milieu, that has the capacity to generate and modify itself. Something with an agency, constitutive of heterogenous events and things, that could or could not affect each other or the whole, something crossed by a force, a thought in which one could occasionally be part, without being addressed or the center.

PH: The entity is simultaneously the actual and another possibility of itself. It can be experienced via the simulation on the screen, in between the two milieux.

PH: I would say the neural network and the bioactivity of the island, rather than the screen. The simulation is just a portal to experience a meeting point between them. Both are simulations. One is ‘natural,’ if we consider the way we perceived nature is a fiction. The other is a neural network generating mutations in the simulation, which is not less a reality than the way we experience the actual we just crossed to arrive to the screen. On the way back to the entrance, both simulations can be undifferentiated, you might get an augmented attention to the environment, take the actual for fiction artefacts or not. I like to think of it as a momentaneous sense increased in the umwelt.

PH: I guess you witness an affected actual, through its possibilities.

PH: In the classic sense an exhibition is a way something is addressed at a subject, under epistemical structures and generally with a requirement to be hysterical. I’ve often talked about not exhibiting an object to someone, but instead exhibiting someone to an object. If the object is becoming more of a subject, it becomes an exchange with an otherness, an alien. An animistic view? But who wants to exhibit otherness? So not an exhibition, as I said earlier, it manifests as it pleases without a dominant viewing subject and out of the control of the one that constructed its existence. The exhibition is a ritual of passage, an operation that makes a creature, an otherness appear. It brings the inanimate, matter, space and thoughts to a sensitive life, an agency to a milieu, a multi-umwelt subject. It is real-time self-operating theater of birth.

PH: The nature of the exhibition model, mainly western based, is a mono viewpoint on the others, it needs other perspectives. It can be extended to any relationship one has with another, think of races, genders, colonization, the established separation culture/nature and all the structures of domination. I prefer to let things be, not trap them in forced ontologies, identities or linearities.

PH: I do not know. I’m thinking of giving voices to otherness, for now, through language, cognition and machine learning. A language that would self-generate, from the milieu it finds itself in. Sensibilized, it would acquire a certain complexity from the environments it would cross. Umwelt could change, which was the speculation around UUmwelt, meaning having other senses onboard, to access other means, times or species. Reality is the actual and its possibilities, multiplying time and space.

VH: When we were working together on the exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2006, I felt that A Journey That Wasn’t crystallized a moment of going elsewhere. And you did go elsewhere just after that exhibition with A Forest of Lines in 2008, the unrealized project Monster Island in 2009 and The Host and the Cloud that same year. I get the impression that Variants, too, may not close anything, but instead be an opening towards a new dynamic.

PH: Probably. I’ve been associated with a reduced idea of ecology since Untilled, life isn’t just allotted to the biological. Being without life is also of interest.