by Fionn Adamian // June 13, 2025
If that impossible longue durée history could be written from the perspective of the animals that co-inhabit our planet, one would first have to settle the question of what—how! and in what sense!—the animals call us in their minds. “Proper names probably not,” writes Anne Carson in ‘Red Doc>.’ “Do they even have pronouns? Do they experience the entire cold sorrow acre of human history as one undifferentiated lunatic jabberwocking back and forth from belligerence to tender care?” Abounding in these stubborn moments of namelessness, the exhibition ‘Hybrid Futures: Rhizomes, Meshworks & Alter-Ecologies’ by the Luxembourg-based platform Elektron addresses our still patchy knowledge of the inner life of organisms, whose lot has been cruelly tossed in with our own.
Alice Bucknell: ‘The Alluvials,’ installation view // Courtesy of Elektron
A technology-forward intervention in the Centre Mercure of Esch-sur-Alzette, most of the works of ‘Hybrid Futures’ treat their digital media as a prosthetic for speculating not just about the human mind, but also about the consciousness of non-human organisms more generally (Elektron represents one of the more notable European institutions to nestle in the wormhole of digital art, alongside Karlsruhe’s Zentrum für Kunst und Medien and Basel’s Haus der elektronischen Künste). Contemplation might sound like an unfamiliar ethos for a video game, but Alice Bucknell’s simulation of a water-scarce Los Angeles, ‘The Alluvials,’ exemplifies this marriage of matter and cybernetic medium. Each of the four consoles that greets the visitor upon entrance to the project space offers the chance to float along the peripatetic path of an inhabitant of a near-future Los Angeles River: a pack of wolves, a Yucca moth.
Immersed in Bucknell’s psychotropic landscape, one will be nonplussed if one looks for the hallmark missions of a role-playing video game. There are no scripted objectives, and the janky controller commands make it expressly hard to navigate the lush California scenery, with its twinkling insects and dry shrubbery. The risk of foregrounding this kind of plotlessness in art, even in the service of deconstructing the anthropocentric perspective, is that it can sound as though you’re pitching the sale of a house that lacks functioning utilities, and you’re no closer to harmony with the Earth for taking a shit in a toilet without plumbing.
Alice Bucknell: ‘The Alluvials’// Courtesy of Elektron
It’s a good thing, then, that there are no houses in ‘The Alluvials’; only the relics of little human diversions, like the dilapidated letters of the Hollywood sign. Similarly to Grand Theft Auto, another post-human paean to the urban environment of L.A., the itinerancy of ‘The Alluvials’ underscores the sense of aimlessness that encroaches on the most well-laid plans of human endeavor, when set in the vast spatio-temporal context of the organic world. Supplied with an infinite number of cars to jack and helicopters to commandeer, Grand Theft Auto solves this problem by maintaining enough stimulation to fuel the giddy nihilism of its players. In ‘The Alluvials,’ the absence of a directing task, and of a respawn function from the present ecological disaster, facilitates the transformation of the video game into video art.
Joey Holder: ‘Abiogenesis,’ installation view // Courtesy of Elektron
In step with contemporary dialogue on ecological art, ‘Hybrid Futures’ traffics in a concept of deep time that unites the existence of the pre-human natural world with fantasies of the post-human machine. Some works, like Crosslucid’s visual reimagining of the Ursula K. Le Guin story ‘Vaster Than Empires,’ vivisect the analogies found in science fiction between Artificial Intelligence and the consciousness of nature. Others, like Joey Holder’s 11-minute video ‘Abiogenesis,’ set the aesthetics of video games in conversation with visions of our future environment. A recent commission by Elektron and Haus der elektronischen Künste, ‘Abiogenesis’ imitates a video game’s loading page, with the “modules” of the download process representing the qualities of undersea creatures that will assist their survival in a post-apocalyptic world. Each animal has its own totemic and epistemic value, perhaps none so bewildering as the longevity of the volcano sponge. Had Caesar lived to see the memes about the Roman Empire, he would have celebrated his 2125th birthday—a mere hearty age for the volcano sponge, whose estimated lifespan reaches as high as 15,000 years. The deep time and oceanic depth of Holder’s creatures, too expansive for the human mind to fathom, is paradoxically capable of being “initialized” for simulation within a few minutes.
What are we to hold onto for stability during this quantum leap across the birth and extinction of our species? The answer, it seems, is theory. The catalog provides a succinct glossary of the terms that one finds in the exhibition—brief definitions of hybridity, rhizome, meshwork, alter-ecology, “becoming (rather than Being),” and more, serve as practical signage for the exhibition’s conceptual grid. Occasionally, however, the works of ‘Hybrid Futures’ veer too sharply into the Deleuze-speak—at least for this recent escapee of a literary studies department. If unfortified against the heat of real world antagonisms, theory has a compromised shelf-life: it curdles into New Age cliché.
Miguel Ângelo Marques, exhibition view // Courtesy of Elektron
In the end, the most intriguing artworks of ‘Hybrid Futures’ are those that resist this tendency by making judicious interventions in the public space of Esch-sur-Alzette. Installed on steel rods that punctuate the commercial store fronts of the Centre Mercure, Bruce Eesly’s photo series ‘New Farmer’ leverages Artificial Intelligence to create a fake documentary of a GMO project, which allowed farmers to produce unseemly, humungous vegetables. The farther the photo series progresses, the more steeply we descend into uncanny valley. In one of the most memorable portraits, a weirdly cherubic boy holds his prized piece of fennel before a jury selection.
Bruce Eesly: ‘New Farmer,’ installation view // Courtesy of Elektron
When it comes to AI, our attention looks for the dissimulated thread that, tugged on firmly enough, will unravel the fictional tapestry and give us the creaking machinery behind the image (other works of the exhibition, like Tamiko Thiel and /p’s Augmented Reality installation ‘Waldwandel/Forest Flux,’ wear the mediation of their devices more visibly on the sleeve). But it isn’t so much the size of the cucumbers as the falsity of the lighting that alerts the viewer to the artifice of Eesly’s ‘New Farmer.’ These Mattel doll protagonists aren’t just white. Reminiscent of the figures from Midsommar or the AfD’s advertisements, they’re white-white. Jutting starkly against the multicultural businesses that fill the shopping center, Eesly teases out the connection between his photo series’ act of fake documentation and the Far Right’s production of myths about an insulated European system of agriculture. Just next to Eesly’s photo series is a South Asian grocery store whose owners seem to have grown fatigued about their merchandise’s aesthetic interest: a “no photography” sign hanging in the window before the color-coded packages of dried food.
Bruce Eesly: ‘New Farmer,’ installation view // Courtesy of Elektron
‘Hybrid Futures’ ends up as something altogether different than it intended; maybe becoming rather than being wasn’t an inapt slogan after all. Despite the proclivity of the exhibition for the diffuse, the achievement of ‘Hybrid Futures,’ with its images of wolves in a near-future wasteland, is to condense the inexplicable pluralities of animal and plant life into singular, jagged contrasts that cut to the chase. With regard to the present environmental crisis, it might be just as important to re-imagine the good old-fashioned plot as to seek models of the natural world’s innumerable diversity. Plot is just a way of reconciling conflict.
Exhibition Info
Elektron
Group Show: ‘Hybrid Futures: Rhizomes, Meshworks and Alter-Ecologies’
Exhibition: May 17-July 26, 2025
elektron.lu
Centre Mercure, 12 Rue de l’Alzette, 4010 Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, click here for map
