“It is a chimera. A blur,” the artist Pierre Huyghe says of his new installation at Kistefos sculpture park in Norway

One wet morning in June, I arrive at the Kistefos Museet, a contemporary art museum and park set in the woods of Jevnaker, Norway – about an hour’s drive out of Oslo. Kistefos, founded in 1996 by the businessman and collector Christen Sveaas, occupies the grounds of a nineteenth-century wood-pulp mill once owned by his grandfather, its 43 acres now teeming with towering sculptures. On an isolated plot of the park a new artwork is mid-installation. Its many protagonists include the gleaming white skeleton of a reindeer, an upturned boat, and the decaying corpse of a fox (a mushroom-like translucent substance blooming from its face). There is a soundtrack too: an uncanny tapestry of noise taken from the landscape – birdsong or trains – that is generative, the project’s curator Anne Stenne tells me. “You understand it’s a bird, but it doesn’t sound like a real bird,” she says. It’s an “echo relay mutation of sound”.

The patch of land – each branch, stone, pool – has been scanned using LiDAR technology (a form of 3D laser-mapping) into a virtual simulation. Constantly updated by sensors dotted around the island, which feed in data on things like local weather conditions, or the water’s chemical composition, this simulation has begun to take on a life of its own. You can even ‘see’ something of that simulation displayed on a gigantic LED screen, nestled in a clearing; the monitor projects the scanned outlines of trees, viewed from the perspective of some feral, stalking creature. But aside from this glimpse, the virtual island remains hidden from us.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.