Infos
2019
“Soundtrack for UUmwelt” is an electroacoustic composition for Pierre Huyghe’s 2019 work Uumwelt. Based on data obtained from neuroscience labs in France and the US, brain activity from mice and rats was rendered audible as sound and used to compose a 45’ soundtrack accompanying Huyghe’s video installation.
For his exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, Pierre Huyghe began with a speculative situation and selected a set of elementary components for its construction. These components are building blocks for young animals, children and intelligent machines to mentally play with, and communicate only using their minds. Huyghe gave these components to be imagined by a subject. The person’s brain activity was captured as they imagined the elements they were prompted to think of. These thoughts, or ‘mental images’ have been reconstructed by a deep neural network.
This series of mental images, here in process
of formation, are now presented on large LED screens distributed throughout the gallery and are endlessly modified by external conditions: light, temperature and humidity levels, the presence of insects, and the gaze of visitors.
The instability of the images displayed on the screens is matched by the exhibition’s inability to resolve itself as existing in the present or the past, even as it evolves towards a future version of itself.