Plinth

To make his installation UUmwelt, Huyghe gave someone at a laboratory in Kyoto a set of interlinked scenarios or objects to visualise. Nobody knows what these specific situations were, but I would speculate that they were simple, as if from a children’s picture book: A is for Apple; B is for Boat. And what we see on screen is the AI making composite images from a database containing thousands of similar examples. So if my theory is correct, the AI would be sifting through all its exemplar pictures of boats to try and approximate the ‘boat’ that Huyghe’s lab-man is thinking about (what kind of boat are you imagining?) The end-result is abstract and ever-forming, as if capturing the precise moment imagination is sparked. The effect is both ghostly and organic. At once, flickering and throbbing. A cell on the brink of dividing. Some cardiac organ palpitating. Or a larva becoming pupa. The A.I.’s images look more organic than the 50,000 live bluebottle flies, static on the walls and ceiling, who have been invited to collaborate on the piece. And it’s flies that are shaping my thinking. Neat — since larva etymologically means ghost, disembodied spirit.

What we have here is rudimentary consciousness. Each ‘thought’ is in constant reconstruction. Light, temperature, humidity, the presence of insects — all of these factors are communicated back to the A.I., and the images react to these outside stimuli. Each thought is new. The gallery is thinking. Or not quite. We could say that the gallery is making larval thoughts. What’s missing is interpretation — the pupa/pupil stage — and that’s where we come in.

The work is only activated when we provide a meaning. What’s missing from this A.I’s consciousness is the drive to interpret stimuli emotionally. And as humans, this meaning-making desire is hard-wired — pun intended. Let me give you an example. Look at the above image. Do you see a dog? I did, for a flicker of a second. I waited through countless permutations and took a quick-fire series of photos until I had one that looked slightly more like a dog. Just so I could show you. But why did this feel so important?

The example of tracks, as in trails, springs to mind (there are tracks here, dust from previous installations has been left to be sifted around by visitors.) Way back in the day — I’m talking way back — reading an imprint in the forest floor would have been a matter of survival. That’s a footprint, and that’s a paw print. The former means you might find a tribe, some shelter, maybe a mate; the latter means lying supine and bloodied while a bear slams your legs against a tree. There are some people who would have you believe that our drive to find meaning is what makes us human. Show me a wolf howling at the moon who would pause to reflect on the face she saw in its craters.

The work is not complete until we interpret it; but as we interact with it the work changes. And it also changes in a literal sense: as more people funnel into the gallery, or as a bluebottle buzzes past a motion sensor, the A.I. responds and alters the scenarios on the screen. The point is not to see what kind of familiar objects we can pick out of a GIF-like Rorschach test; instead, our focus is on how we interpret. And, here, we’re complicit in a strangely circular version of interpretation, because the concepts of ‘sender’ and ‘sendee’ are so troubled. For example, let’s say, hypothetically, that Huyghe’s initial instruction had been, ‘Think of a dog.’ The image on the LED screen would not be the dog that I see. It would not even be the dog that the guy in the lab imagined. It would be a flickering chimera of dogs being reconstructed right in front of me. All ‘originally’ mapped from stock images of dogs. And, finally, what we encounter is nothing like a dog at all, but the vestige of a half-formed thought, an echo of an echo. These images are simulacra, copies that have no original. The impression we’re left with is something like a collective consciousness, traces from the dreams we all share. Rather than an interpreter, it’s more useful (fun) to think of our role in the work as like a synapse, permitting signals to be passed from cell to cell.

What is generous about this work is that it allows us to consider human consciousness from nonhuman perspectives — a complex immersive ecosystem, fMRI, a business of flies — so that we might see the way we think all the clearer. We all like to think that we have agency over our thoughts — some believe we have a soul. Certainly, it’s very difficult to think of thought as a completely organic process of stimulus-response when a pigeon shits on you by the lake in Hyde Park, and you wonder why you were stupid enough to have walked under it when there were clearly pigeons and parrots on every bough and branch. It’s good, occasionally, to be reminded that we aren’t that special. Sometimes it’s important to deglamorise the idea of human beings as the thinking creature. After all, the galleries and buses and networks we are building today all emerged over millions of years out of organic matter, combined with simple thought after simple thought. Each thought just an electrical or chemical stimulus. Then a response. At the Serpentine, until February 10th, you’re the final piece of the puzzle – the translator from stimuli to meaning. Wherever you go, and until you die, you’re carrying a version of UUmwelt between your ears.

By Sammi Gale.