Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe (born 1962 in Paris) is among the most influential living French artists, winner of the Nasher Prize and a special-mention Golden Lion, known for ecosystem-like exhibitions where living organisms, weather, and machines behave beyond the artist’s control — a dog with a pink leg at Documenta 13 became one of the century’s iconic artworks.

Machine intelligence as ecosystem

Huyghe has folded AI into his work since UUmwelt at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2018, where neural networks trained on fMRI data attempted to reconstruct images from human brain activity, flickering across screens in a room of live flies. He has described wanting exhibitions in which the artist is not the only generator of intentions but part of an ensemble of intelligences, biotic and abiotic.

His 2024 survey Liminal at Punta della Dogana in Venice, curated with Anne Stenne for the Pinault Collection, was saturated with machine learning: a self-directed film edited in real time by AI, robotics driven by learning systems, sensor-fed simulations, and an AI-generated language spoken by masked performers. In Camata, machine-directed robots filmed a human skeleton in the Atacama desert, the footage endlessly re-edited by algorithm.

Huyghe’s stance resists cheerleading — his interest is in AI as a genuinely non-human intelligence, an “outside” that unsettles the human vantage rather than serves it. But his sustained, decade-long use of machine learning at the highest levels of the art world makes him one of AI’s most serious artistic adopters.