Year: 2024
Medium: Real time voice generated by Artificial Intelligence, golden LED screen masks
Dimensions: 31 x 19.5 x 19 cm (12 1/4 x 7 5/8 x 7 1/2 in.)
Acquired from TARO NASU, 2024
This shiny, lustrous gold-colored mask is made in smooth curves to give a form that resembles a human head that has had all definitions shaved away. We recognize it as a mask covering a human head or face because our experience has programmed us to receive any egg-shaped form with a gentle ridgeline in the center as such. The work’s title is “Idiom,” which can refer to a fixed phrase or an established expression. Inside the mask are built-in sensors that pick up environmental sounds and the voices of people around it, and an AI system then studies and analyzes the sounds that have been gathered to generate and speak its own personal “language.” This language is unique to the Idioms, different to human language, and therefore beyond our recognition or comprehension—to us, they register as nothing more than sounds. An idiom is a combination of words where the meaning diverges from what a literal reading would lead one to understand, and idioms are only able to function because people learn their meaning through experience. In terms of defining and signifying experienced phenomena, the “language” spoken by Idiom follows the same principles as human language, but whatever rules correspond to its grammar probably adhere to a model beyond human understanding. Moreover, the Idioms language is constantly evolving in response to the environment in which they are placed. When language has the objective of communicating ideas with others, such rapid changes are avoided. Idiom’s language is for Idiom, so to speak, and thus deviates from the category of human language as a code for sharing meaning with others and will continue to produce an infinite number of non-human words.
pic1: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper, TARO NASU, Leeum Museum of Art
pic2, 3: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper, TARO NASU, Leeum Museum of Art
Installation view, Pierre Huyghe, Liminal, Punta della Dogana, Venice, 2024
Photo credit: Ola Rindal
