Examining last century’s art through a post-formalist lens reveals two key aspects: the gradual blurring of the line between viewer and artwork; and the profound impact on aesthetic experience resulting from the evolving spatialization of art. This approach has not only shifted the focus from formal elements like medium specificity, but has also underscored less tangible factors, such as the role of artworks in shaping the observer’s perception. Liberated from traditional confines tied to artistic genres, the centrality of sensory experience has become paramount in interpreting contemporary works.
This perspective is well suited to describing the heterogeneity of works commissioned by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for the 18th edition of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, which gained international prominence a decade ago thanks to Andrea Bellini’s foresight and acumen. The current edition presents unprecedented productions that are resistant to categorization and that elude traditional interpretative approaches. Numerous artworks take shape through immersive and interactive dynamics, with a fluid conception of space in which distinctions between real and virtual seem to dissolve. The title chosen by curators Nora N. Khan and Bellini, “A Cosmic Movie Camera,” evokes the image of a dance of light around the event horizon of a black hole. It also implicitly questions the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence, not only aesthetically but also ethically and philosophically. The Biennale reflects on one of our era’s most significant paradigm shifts, demanding a reshaping of our thinking and a reconsideration of how we conceive and engage with reality. The fifteen artists in the show, many renowned for their work with coding and machine learning, variously reflect on the need to recalibrate our gaze in an increasingly blurred context between the material and the virtual.
VideoSculpture XXX (The Gospel) (2024) by Emmanuel Van der Auwera unfolds as a sophisticated metaphor for the ambiguity permeating our perception of reality. The images projected from the monolithic white screen, visible only through the underlying black, result from intricate video generation and neural radiance fields. The work poses a fundamental question about the responsibility inherent to the act of observation, suggesting that human experience is progressively losing its ability to discern subtle alterations to reality introduced by artificial intelligence. This reflection fits into a broader context, in which exhibited works foster an awareness of our ever-evolving perception due to profound technological advancements. The installation by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, titled Postscript: After everything is extracted (2020), presents itself as an extraordinary digital performance wrapped in a poeticism that transcends any attempt at description. Within this immersive experience, the fluidity with which artists blend the physical and the virtual challenges the observer’s linearity of thought and their traditional image interpretation system. A fluctuating dimension emerges through a performative dynamic involving moving images, sounds, digital avatars, pop-up windows, and scripts. This fusion of liminal space and virtual time creates a non-physical place and a nonlinear temporality that magnetically captivates the viewer.
Numerous works on display require a constant renegotiation of the gaze, inviting a decentralization of thought impulses and an embrace of perceptual systems that are less intellectual and more intuitive. They challenge the perceiver’s capacity to control or anticipate the artwork, immersing them instead in an unfamiliar world and space guided by its own logic. This is seen in Sahej Rahal’s Distributed Mind Test (2023) and Interspecifics’ CODEX VIRTUALIS_EMERGENCE 0.1 (2023–24), a six-channel semi-generative audiovisual installation. In Rahal’s cooperative multiplayer game, players morph into nonhuman entities that operate and think beyond the conventional boundaries of individual human cognition, delivering a gaming experience that defies traditional cognitive constraints. Conversely, Interspecifics’ images of life forms created through artificial neural networks resemble a living tapestry in which fantastical animated creatures enact a luminous choreography. The narrated prose within this immersive experience intricately spins tales about existence, seamlessly harmonizing with an enveloping sonic ambience that skillfully mirrors the nuances of living environments, blurring the boundaries between the living, virtual and synthetic.
Just as the Event Horizon Telescope has captured an image of one of the most mysterious astrophysical phenomena, which gives the title to this edition, the exhibited works subtly foreshadow what might unfold. However, presuming BIM ’24 signals the dawn of a fresh genre or medium would be a misjudgment. The diverse and distinctive character of the featured works firmly rejects such a notion. Instead, the essence of this edition appears to focus on depicting the collaboration between artificial intelligence and humans as transformative on an existential level, primarily for the experiential metamorphosis it can induce, illustrating the intricate nature of this phenomenon beyond the current capacity of critical discourse.
