Since the mid-2010s, the work of Pierre Huyghe (*1962) has departed from earlier engagements with the temporalities of cinema and television, the customs of social communities and the volatile property relations in global media culture to proposing redefinitions of the objects and sites of contemporary art in terms of autopoietic concatenations of living organisms and technological entities in virtually unfathomable milieus of cohabitation and interdependence. Offering a series of case studies of recent works by the French artist since 2018, this lecture will make the attempt to situate his practice in the history of art’s relation to its increasingly hybrid environments (from Land Art to site-specificity and system aesthetics), not the least to critically discuss Huyghe’s use of “Artifical Intelligence” (for example in the film Camata from 2024, currently on view at Bourse de Commerce in Paris) that would seem to aim at confronting far-reaching questions regarding the ontology and epistemology of art under the conditions of an “environmentalization” of non-conscious, yet highly imaginative digital technologies. 

André Rottmann is a Berlin-based art historian who has been Professor for Art and Media Theory at Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, since 2022. His writings on contemporary art have appeared in journals like OCTOBER, Grey Room, Artforum, Cahiers d’Art and Texte zur Kunst, among others, and in catalogues of international museums and exhibitions (for example the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Kunstmuseum Basel, Migros Museum, Zurich and Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017). Recent and upcoming publications include the book Isa Genzken. Fuck the Bauhaus (Afterall One Works Series/The MIT Press, 2024) and the anthology Pierre Huyghe. October File 31 (The MIT Press, April 2026). He has been an advisory board member of OCTOBER magazine since 2024.  

The event is part of the bi-annual theme “Nature” of DFK Paris, led by Peter Geimer and Pierre Wat.