PHILIPPE PARRENO

Philippe Parreno’s exhibitions are living organisms, responsive to their environments and the people within them. Think RobertRauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951), famously described by John Cage as ‘airports for lights, shadows, and particles’ asmulti-dimensional entities powered by an AI. Parreno’s exhibition at Gladstone, Hertzian Tales is the most recent manifestationof his ongoing contemplation of art as both sentient and sensual. New and recent works perform an intricate choreography inreaction to multiple stimuli, some as ineffable as the slow melt of time or invisible shifts in barometric pressure, othersas shocking and urgent as climate change. The transparent acrylic Clock (2020) with its multiple faces animated bygears controlled by a DMX box, adheres to the forward propulsion of passing minutes, yet stutters and shifts according tochanges in the atmosphere. The video, The Owl in Daylight (2020-2023)—never before exhibited in the U.S.—comprises a CGI-animated waterscape in which light and vapor and a fugitive city appear and disappear algorithmically inconcert with actual climactic fluctuations. Part weather station, part imaginary world, this digital work pays homage to thelast, unfinished, eponymously titled novel by sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, situated on an alien planet that lacks soundand considers the cacophony of Earth as a kind of heaven. The video’s generative soundtrack was conceived bycomposer and sound engineer Nicolas Becker to blend naturalistic noises with abstract echoes of our tech-drivenlandscape. An additional layer of sound will interact with the video for its current manifestation in the gallery. The voice ofactor Charlotte Gainsbourg (with whom Parreno is currently working on a film project) responds to events on the screenand the sounds that emanate from it. The non-narrative voiceover is determined by a computer program that synchs soundwith the mutable components of the video. Using the Markov model, which assumes that all future states depend only onthe current state, the algorithm allows for series of permutations. Parreno’s heliostat sculpture, which captures themovement of sunlight to then reflect it onto a stationary point, will follow the sound of Gainsbourg’s voice,sending a ray of solar energy onto the screen in response to it. Like the beam of a film projector in a cinema, this lightalludes to an unfolding narrative. The heliostat, the voiceover, and the video are synchronized like a mechanicalballet, a multi-part automaton recounting a lyrical, esoteric story.