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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

After ALife Ahead

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Act 1, Scene 3: An Artwork
Eco-diegesis in Pierre Huyghe's installation, 'After ALife Ahead'

Is it possible to make art which is indifferent to its audience?
Pierre Huyghe's installation attempts to respond to this question. The work is noted by several art critics to operate within a post-anthropocentric dimension by functioning as a hybridised ecosystem within itself.
Critic Andrew Russeth observes,
[this] is an artwork that is slowly spiralling into something else, moving away from its creator, and only giving off little glimpse of its operations at it evolves […] There’s no telling what it will look like at the end.
The enigmatic artwork is located at an abandoned ice-skating rink hidden behind a Burger King, on the periphery of Münster, utterly removed from the city. The site space consists of a plethora of elements: technological algorithms; a venomous sea snail whose shell adorns an intricate pattern of cellular automata; a self-governing mathematical model that triggers the opening and closing of the glass pyramids constructed on the site’s ceiling; living non-human organisms, peacocks and bees. As rain pours into the site of the installation work algae grows in the pools of water. The dirt ground is dug up in the complex grid of Archimedes Stomachion logic. There are cancer cells multiplying in incubators at varying lengths depending on the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The cells shift constantly, evolving and growing in a self-organising system; a symbiosis between the technological and the natural. Their patterns are translated into a musical composition that plays throughout the space. Once the artist leaves, the work continues to morph.

In one way, this complex ecosystem can be perceived as autonomous. The artist, Huyghe, himself comments that the work explores,
[…] a way to shift the centrality of the human position - whether as a maker or receptor. Indiscernibility and unpredictability are among other operations that could shift that position.
The notion of de-centring is pivotal to Rosi Braidotti’s theory which claims that, “we seem to have entered the post-human predicament.” (2) As a result, the hierarchy established by the Enlightenment is subverted. Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” no longer is the locus of all relationships, between human or more-than-human entities.
Rather, in exploring the excavated premise, one realises how anthropocentric understandings of ontology are undermined, as art critic Emily McDermott notes how Huyghe,
[…has] designed the system such that the technology involved is dependent on natural factors, reversing the traditional notion that technologies can somehow bring nature under control.
The technological aspects of the artwork function only in response to the movement of the organisms. The organic stimuli cannot be predicted nor controlled by the artist, as it is both “indiscernible” and “unpredictable.” Therefore, Huyghe’s installation work can be seen in Braidotti’s terms, as:
[a] mechinic autopoiesis [which] means that the technological is a site of post- anthropocentric becoming, or the threshold to many possible worlds (94).
To return to the opening question, Is it possible to make art which is indifferent to its audience? Huyghe’s artwork ultimately lends itself to be read from an eco-critical lens.
In their essay, “Writing the Anthropocene,” Boes and Marshall call for a shift from Timothy Morton’s proposed “eco-mimesis” towards an “ecodiegesis” as the former implies the necessity for the author or artists “intervention”, whereas the latter “gives a voice to the planet itself” (64).
While Huyghe’s practice operates on a microcosmic scale, and does not claim to speak for the planet, he instigates a system in which the artist is no longer needed. The artwork is complex to understand. Not in the way one reads an esoteric modernist poem, but in the way that the work is not created for an audience. We, like the artist, are rendered unnecessary. There is no way in which the entirety of the artwork can ever be grasped because it is ever-evolving. It is not stagnant, nor does it remain the same like the untouched landscape which the Romantic poet returns to after "five years have passed [...] five long winters!" (Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey) Within seconds changes occur, that we cannot even comprehend. The ecological elements that comprise the artwork continually inscribe themselves on the site of installation.
It is noted that on the 100th day, the artwork was removed. Its transience once again de-centres us as the artwork cannot be preserved. It is like a cloud, temporal, without any solid surface behind. Huyghes himself notes the tragic condition of this in the way tragic protagonist’s destruction is realised inevitable by the audience the moment the play commences.
If this is true, then why do continue to watch the events unfold? Aristotle’s answer to this question would be catharsis — a relief from strong, repressed emotions. However, the logic of catharsis depends on the idea of fiction, of an event as distinct from reality in which we continue, whereas the character is destroyed.
However, as Huyghe’s artwork suggests, the inevitability of our immediate destruction is tangible, is not does not occur in the imagination. The work gives a brief insight into a world which does not need us to exist.

~ Vedika Rampal
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Cited Texts:
Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S.H Butcher. The Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm
Boes, Tobias, and Marshall, Kate. “Writing the Anthropocene: An Introduction.” The Minnesota Review 2014 (83): 60–72. https://doi-org.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/10.1215/00265667-2782243
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Oxford: Polity Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=1315633
McDermott, Emily. “Pierre Huyghe’s Latest Project Is Part Biotech Lab, Part Scene from a Sci-Fi Film.” Artsy, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-pierre-huyghes-latest-project-biotech-lab-scene-sci-fi-film
Russeth, Andrew. “Constant Displacement: Pierre Huyghe on His Work at Skulptur Projekte Münster.” Artnews, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/constant-displacement-pierre-huyghe-on-his-work-at-skulptur-projekte-munster-2017-8602/

Wordworth, William. "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798." Poery Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798