Bonus Episode: Pierre Huyghe - An image is a situation. Not a photograph. But a situation

00:00:04: My name is Charlotte de Saga and this is an art-unquoted bonus episode.

00:00:17: An image as a situation, not a photograph but a situation.

00:00:23: That sentence by French artist Pierre Rique has stayed with me for years And the more I think about it The more seems to unlock something essential Not just his work But how we experience anything at all.

00:00:36: Let's explain Why would anyone talk about an exhibition that is almost a decade old, especially one that was visually austere with lots of empty space and barely anything to see?

00:00:50: Because this show revealed something remarkable.

00:00:53: Something about life consciousness time.

00:00:57: I think i wasn't fully aware back then but the ideas kept returning And recently I visited Pierre Weeks major new exhibition at the Fondasseur Bayerle in Basel.

00:01:07: suddenly Everything I had experienced in London came back into focus.

00:01:13: You walk into a dark gallery, no artificial lights.

00:01:16: the air buzzes flies everywhere their cluster.

00:01:20: on glowing screens drawn to the warmth.

00:01:23: On the walls layers of old paint are exposed.

00:01:26: each layer is trace for previous exhibition time made visible On large LED screens, images flicker.

00:01:35: Blurry ghost-like!

00:01:36: You don't know what you're looking at but can look away... That was U-Umwelt spelled with two capital U. Pierre-Huix installation in the Serpentine Gallery In fall of….

00:01:50: ...two thousand and eighteen.

00:01:53: The gallery is minimal almost empty.

00:01:56: Every small sound echoes every movement matters There's an unsettling silence, but then you notice the flies.

00:02:05: They're living freely roaming —you hear the buzz of their wings— they feed... ...they mate….

00:02:11: …they die.

00:02:12: Their dead bodies accumulate on the floors Small cycles of life and death compressed into moments.

00:02:20: there is a smell not the typical clean exhibition space-smell But something warm Something stagnant.

00:02:28: One large wall is extraordinary.

00:02:30: It's been carefully sanded in patches and layers of paint underneath.

00:02:36: Each layer shows a historical trace, like the rings on a tree trunk.

00:02:40: The dust from the sanding remains on the floor.

00:02:43: Visitors carry it unknowingly through their gallery And becomes part of an evolving exhibition.

00:02:50: Then there are images Five sequences On large LED screens.

00:02:55: Quite unlike anything.

00:02:56: you've seen Phantoms as if consciousness itself is flickering on the screens.

00:03:02: Dance shapes, organic forms that seem mechanical – they resist categorization.

00:03:09: only through imaginative effort you can relate them to anything you know.

00:03:14: The flies are drawn into the screens.

00:03:16: They cluster onto surfaces As if they believe their screens are alive.

00:03:20: But these screens show something else entirely Artificial reconstructions of human thought Living creatures attracted to images of consciousness, life without understanding thought without life.

00:03:36: I stood there and couldn't distinguish between the two.

00:03:39: somehow both seemed equally real.

00:03:43: What are these images?

00:03:44: A test subject was shown images while their brain activity was recorded.

00:03:49: an artificial neural network then attempted to reconstruct what a person had been imagining.

00:03:56: The result?

00:03:57: Moments of consciousness captured before they solidify into language or meaning.

00:04:02: Unborn thoughts visualized by machine flickering ungraspable Like the monolith in a space Odyssey, an object that resists comprehension and transforms those who encounter it.

00:04:18: To understand what Yük is doing we need to understand the title.

00:04:26: It's like a stutter, it refers to theory by the German biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uxkül.

00:04:33: In nineteen hundred nine, Uxcül developed a concept called Umwelt, environment that describes the perceptual world of an organism – his thought.

00:04:44: each living being experiences its own reality.

00:04:48: A flies.

00:04:49: entire life might be just few days.

00:04:51: in this time lives complete.

00:04:54: A fly's one-minute flight is half a lifetime.

00:04:58: For us, it's a blink!

00:05:00: This means time isn't universal – Time is created by consciousness.

00:05:15: There is no single reality.

00:05:17: there are many realities layered on top of each other, Each one equally valid to the organism Experiencing it.

00:05:26: Yksger wrote without a living subject that can be No time.

00:05:32: and this isn't a poetic metaphor.

00:05:34: It's a description Of how reality actually works.

00:05:39: And now return To That sentence an image Is A situation not a photograph but a situation.

00:05:48: In Rüks Umwelt, the image involves the flies – The wall?

00:05:53: Dust?

00:05:54: Reconstructed thoughts?

00:05:56: Viewer?

00:05:57: Time-passing?

00:05:59: All of these together create an image.

00:06:02: Remove the fly and the image changes!

00:06:04: Remove the viewer… And there is no image at all!

00:06:09: The image isn't the screen, it's what happens between the screen & you And this is a radical concept.

00:06:18: We tend to think of images as fixed things, captured moments frozen in time.

00:06:25: but the artist says no an image is alive it unfolds.

00:06:31: It depends on who's looking and when and under what conditions.

00:06:35: When you stand at this gallery You're not just observing your participating.

00:06:40: Your attention generates the meaning.

00:06:45: This came to my mind again when I visited Fondassio Bayerle in Basel.

00:06:50: Huig has created an entirely new exhibition for this space, but a very similar logic to Umwelt runs through everything!

00:06:58: This time ants make up the cast.

00:07:01: In one room ants form paths across a gallery wall and another a carpet records repeated movements of visitors tracing their path over time.

00:07:13: A new work called Light Dust spreads a continuous field of color dust and cast artificial light throughout the entire exhibition.

00:07:21: In another room, a piece titled Time Keeper reveals layers of wall paint from past exhibitions.

00:07:28: The dust form.

00:07:29: the sanding is carried through space by walking visitors.

00:07:34: An archaeology of exhibitions shaped by accumulation time it visible again.

00:07:41: And then there is adversary, a large closed gate the threshold on its surface.

00:07:47: A high bar relief.

00:07:49: not one fixed image but one image among all possible images.

00:07:54: it emerges from a shared process human imagination and machine computation together and shifts.

00:08:02: every viewer brings their own perception at work changes with that.

00:08:06: you don't see this same thing twice You Don't See What I See.

00:08:11: Again, an image is a situation.

00:08:16: The artist describes this exhibition as a soul escape in inner world formed by multiple temporalities voices and subjectivities where contradiction and uncertainty define each experience.

00:08:31: that word soul scape suggests That what uke's mapping Is not the external word but the internal one not what exists, but is felt.

00:08:42: And this where Yüksekül returns.

00:08:44: each organism has its own umwelt it's own experience reality.

00:08:50: and Huig doesn't just illustrate the idea he builds it.

00:08:55: He reconstructs environments with biological, geological, artificial and human.

00:09:02: all collide All present at once all equally real incomplete.

00:09:11: When these worlds collide something singular happens we stop being observers, We become participants.

00:09:19: Every moment of attention creates a situation and in that situation time is born An image as the situation.

00:09:29: And a situation Is something you enter Something That Changes You Something That Doesn't Exist Without You.