The Serpentine Gallery stinks. There’s something in the air, some intensely chemical stench, half way between bleach and rotting meat.
Flies buzz around or lie dead on the ground, the paint on the walls has been sanded back, the floor is caked in dust.
Dotted throughout the space, screens spin through ceaselessly strobing and mutating images that your eyes just can’t grasp. The shapes could be faces, bodies or machines. Maybe a hybrid of all of those. It’s impossible to tell.
French conceptualist Pierre Huyghe has dragged the Serpentine into an abandoned future. The images on the screens were imagined by human brains, but captured by computers, Now, deep neural networks are shaping and reshaping the images. It looks like a computer trying desperately to decode human thought. With the speed the images are going, you get a gross, growing sense of fear that they’re only moments away from decoding how we work – the question is, what then?
With the sanded walls revealing a whole history of past shows, the stench of chemical death, the buzz of flies and the neural networks operate on levels we’ll never understand, Huyghe has created a post-human nightmare. A crushing sense of impending doom, of the show acting as a window into an uncontrollable future, hangs over everything in here. The room feels alive and threatening. It’s a brilliant idea, but it feels only half-executed. That’s a shame as a viewing experience, but probably a good thing for humanity’s chances of survival.
@eddyfrankel
