You wake up from a vivid dream, but find it’s gone by daylight; you see something beautiful or surprising in the morning, but can’t describe it fully by afternoon. What if you could just download your thoughts into images, without the intercession of memory or language? The French artist Pierre Huyghe wondered too, and his new exhibition here, made with the help of some ambitious neuroscientists and some nifty technology, suggests what the images in our heads might look like. Mr. Huyghe has always been a cerebral artist, but his new show here is cerebral in a literal way — generated from consciousness itself.
Mr. Huyghe’s exhibition “Uumwelt,” which opened last week at the Serpentine Galleries in London’s stately Kensington Gardens, offers something uncommon in an art setting: a wholly new kind of imagery. The artist collaborated with Japanese scientists who can translate M.R.I. scans into pictures, and the resultant, restless impressions of brain activity mutate and pullulate from frame to frame.
Learn more: Pierre Huyghe Reads Our Minds, and Discovers a New Art Form