Louis Morlæ

In his first solo exhibition in the Nordic region, Louis Morlæ transforms the Danish art venue Tranen into a machine that generates visions of the end of the world. He is preoccupied with how the tech industry has shaped the world as we know it, and how the development of artificial intelligence now heralds the demise of that very world. In the horizon we glimpse new forms of society and life, and although many envision and speculate, no one dares make definitive predictions. Dreams of progress have been replaced by ambitions of so-called disruption. The motto “move fast and break things” – once Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s guiding principle – is today an increasingly widespread way of thinking about innovation and society.

Louis Morlæ is an Australian-born British-based artist who works with emerging technologies. Using AI, video generators, 3D printing, robotics, new materials, and a variety of collaborators, he creates sculpture, film, music, machines and more with an aerospace engineer’s attention to detail. Morlæ’s works are, in a sense, also status reports from our civilization’s engine room. His exhibition Walls at the World’s End explores the possibilities and consequences of technological and scientific breakthroughs that shape his practice and the surrounding world.

Tranen’s new exhibition centres on three mobile robotic walls on wheels, which mimic the walls of the exhibition space. Louis Morlæ treats Tranen as a small abstract model of our ever-changing world, where the form and boundaries are currently in flux and constantly up for negotiation. The artist is shaped by both utopian and dystopian visions of our times and the world’s impending end. He speculates on where the world as we know it will end, and where a new and unknown world will begin.

The walls in the exhibition title – Walls at the World’s End – refer to Morlæ’s moving walls at Tranen, which are periodically repositioned into new configurations. The walls’ movement patterns are generated by an ingenious and inscrutable AI system that harvests live data from the internet, based on its own poetic pairs of concepts, such as “the fence – the horizon” and “the furnace – the tide.” In other words, the movement of the walls is dictated by what is happening around the globe. But the underlying logic of Morlæ’s machine is also incomprehensible to Morlæ himself – just as the artificial intelligence that shapes our lives is now incomprehensible even to the engineers who develop it.

Hanging on the end wall of the Tranen exhibition space, above Morlæ’s walls, is a spectacular airbag with flashing lights, calling to mind a “kill switch” that can shut down a robot, or AI. The balloon can be inflated inside Tranen’s chamber, thereby minimizing the range of motion of the moving walls. The airbag epitomizes tech developers’ so-called safety measures – and at the same time hot air. In the AI industry, players driving its rapid development defend themselves by claiming they will also regulate AI. Their purported strategy is to both let the genie out of, and back into, the bottle, as if they were simply inflating and deflating a balloon. Morlæ is preoccupied with the paradoxical ambition of developing a form of intelligence that is both superior to humans and controllable by humans.

Finally, the exhibition features three films about three possible endings to the world as we know it. They are not predictions of the world’s potential end. Rather, they are imaginings and fevered fantasies about the future, which may call to mind the peculiar answers – called “hallucinations” – that AIs sometimes offer their users. In one film, an individualist in the vein of tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel loses himself in a bleak and distorted version of his own visions of the future. In another, an eco-collective in the countryside is depicted during a techno rave interrupted by an alien abduction. A third film presents a multispecies society in a post-human era, seen from the perspective of ecstatic bees.

The three films are made by use of the latest AI video generators as they come onto the market. The work is thus also an exploration of the different kinds of world building, worldview and attitude different kinds of technology afford as of now.

With his moving walls, Morlæ reflects on how the frameworks of our lives and society are changing. His films offer the audience stories and visions of the future where this change makes sense – or perhaps ceases to make sense. Walls at the World’s End offers numerous scenarios for the end of the world as we know it, and no answers about what lies beyond.

Toke Lykkeberg

Director of Tranen
Gentofte, Denmark