Pierre Huyghe Mind's Eye (FY), 2021
Materialized deep image reconstruction, synthetic and biological material aggregate (sugar, resin, bronze, copper, bismuth, iron oxide, metal slag, shellac, sisal, foam, glass, stainless steel), micro-organisms
88 x 63 x 171 cm
Edition of 2
Pierre Huyghe's Mind’s Eye belongs to a series of unique three-dimensional works composed of organic and inorganic materials.
The specific shapes of the Mind’s Eye works bring up immediate associations with natural forms of general familiarity: an animal, a vegetable, an organ. The shapes originate in Huyghe’s project UUmwelt. A set of private ideas and memories were given as images or descriptions to be imagined by a subject. As the person imagined these components, the brain activity was captured by a scanner (a so-called functional MRI, as it visualizes not just the organ but its function). By learning to recognize and read the signals, a computer then reconstructed ‘mental images’ from brain activity. In other words, the computer translates the information generated by a human subject's brain activity into images, extrapolating from what it has learned.
Each unique work in the series Mind’s Eye materializes such generated images into a three-dimensional form, still retaining the aspect of familiarity with the original perceived image.