Introduction
Philippe Parreno’s solo exhibition at the Gropius Bau has various different modes of existence that will change over time.
Some works reappear in a mutated form. Both films Anywhen (2017) and The Crowd (2018) have been entirely re-edited. The flower wallpaper, previously seen as a background element on the set of Parreno’s film Marilyn (2012), comes to the fore as an individual work covering a gallery wall. Hundreds of drawings of fireflies flash on a large LED screen and then fade away, their lifespan governed by algorithms. This is an automaton made out of many others.
Disembodied, free- floating sensations and intensities will directly affect the bodies of the works themselves and those visiting the show. In one room, three different wind vortexes guide the circulation of balloon fish on an elaborate path. Live sounds, emanating from somewhere in or beyond the city, leak inside the museum walls and spread from one room to another.
You will notice some synchronicities. Sounds re-surface in the reflecting pool of the atrium as they are transduced into visual patterns of water lilies. Light changes in the galleries as automatic blinds rise and fall, following a rhythm governed by an unknown authority. Another area is bathed in an eerie orange glow that evokes the fictional future of our fading sun.
As we move through the exhibit, we begin to feel as though we have entered a dimension not organised according to our normal spatial coordinates. This is an inner space, a purely mental landscape, a site animated by fuzzy logic.
In an isolated booth there is a bioreactor consisting of a beaker in which microorganisms multiply, mutate, and adapt to their environment. Connected to computers that orchestrate the events in the exhibition, these yeast cultures develop a memory—a collective intelligence—that learns the changing rhythms of the show and evolves to anticipate future variations. As the micro-organisms continuously interact with each other, and with the contingent events taking place in the museum, their neural circuitry sets a complex non-deterministic, non-linear mise-en-scène in motion through a series of non-periodic cycles.