WHAT HAPPENS WHEN MACHINES ARE LET OUT IN THE WILD?
South Korean, US-based artist Anicka Yi explores this reality in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
07/08/24
What used to be the Bankside Power Station in 1981, has now been brought alive by Yi, with an ecosystem of floating fungi-like machines inhabiting Tate Modern’s industrial space. The exhibition, titled ‘in love with the world’, consists of two species ‘xenojellies’ and ‘planulae’, which are a series of helium filled ‘aerobes’ that seem to mellowly traverse the space, alike the behavior of marine species. AI controlled, powered through rotors, and battery packs, the translucent bubble specimens playfully interact with visitors. They nimble around in a balletic motion, adorned with colored tops, short hair, and long tentacles. These are accompanied by odor, which just as these organisms, inhabit the air becoming mediums of expression to Yi. Visitors are exposed to an array of smells that go back to the Precambrian era, to the black death, all from periods of history to the bankside. As the odors shift, the behavior of the aerobes does so. ‘In love with the world’, opened from October 12 of 2021 to January 16 of 2022, displays to us an alternate ecosystem that is not-so-alien to our current reality. It explores the relationships of the technological and the biologically alive, whilst it asks us to re-imagine a world where machines come to live as we fall in love with them.
Isabella Pirro