Variants (2022) is an ongoing site specific installation by Pierre Huyghe in Kistefos, Norway. Link to Variants: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/473018/pierre-huyghevariants/
The techs used here seems way beyond my range of knowledge but the work and visuals are very beautiful. Huyghe built this bio-machinery ecosystem (?) in a sculpture park. The screen in the picture above displays a scanned simulation of the environment. He has multiple sensors that inputs the data of the soil toxicity, water levels, solar levels, the wind, movements of animals and so on into the simulation (the simulation can also be manipulated and navigated). The simulation is then incorporated into a digital network, and AI is used to generate mutations onto this simulated network (mentioned Dall-E and another AI that I can’t make sense of due to his strong French accent. He starts talking about this from the 3:08 minutes mark) and the simulation starts to grow and transform on its own. (Whether the mutations are random or not he does not say, but they seem way too conforming to his aesthetics and themes to be entirely random)
What’s interesting to me is that he also makes the mutations come true in the actual physical environments of this installation. I have no idea how he’s doing this, and I quote him from the interview that “once in a while…the mutations in the digital simulations *somehow*” go out and is implemented, manifesting in the physical world. These affect the place loop back to the sensors and the scanners and so there’s a constant changing and growing feedback loop. He also says towards the end of this segment (around 4:52) that the camera/scanner is probably also controlled and manipulated by an AI and thus the way the environment is captured also changes over time.
I’m mostly interested in his feedback loop that changes the environment (I do feel like the fact that someone may have to manually implement the mutations takes away from the project a little), and the (?)emergent(?) mutations he does in the digital simulation. It feels like playing God to a certain extent.
Interview and intro to his works: