As you lie back on the cool, cushioned surface and close your eyes, the lights begin pulsing and flashing – like sunlight flickering through tree branches as you drive past at speed. Then there’s the audio: deep frequencies and drones that combine to make a fluid and spacious soundscape. Enter “The Oracle”, a light sculpture that is one of four interactive works at HumanLab, an exhibition running at Quantum Galerie on Ku’damm until the end of March 2025. Intended by its creators at Paris-based collective Alpha Wave Experience to “stimulate your optic nerve”, The Oracle is likened by the exhibition’s curators to an ayahuasca ceremony. While your author cannot vouch for that claim, what’s beyond doubt is that the installation is deeply meditative and, yes, hallucinatory – like a lucid dream but with your brain fully dialed in. Overall twenty artists are participating in the show, whose digital artworks probe the connection between humans and technology.
This is done particularly effectively by another participant, Japanese media artist Ryoichi Kurokawa, who has partnered with the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) to turn nano-level scientific data into immersive art shown on multi-channel displays with 4ch sound. Kurokawa’s visuals are fed by the data INL extracts from electron microscopy, computational modeling and quantum mechanics – fields that go way beyond human perception. The artwork takes on new meaning as experts now predict that artificial general intelligence will surpass humans in every cognitive task by 2026. Facing this future, the exhibition asks: what’s left of being human? In addition, visitors can take part in a curated program of performances and sessions, focussing on bringing body and mind closer together again. As we are increasingly moving in digital and technological spaces, it is time to ask ourselves, how technology can be more than just functional.
Text: Benji Haughton / Photos: HumanLab
Quantum Galerie, Kurfürstendamm 210, 10719 Berlin–Charlottenburg; map
HumanLab, until 30.03.2025. Buy tickets here.
@humanlab4.0
@quantum.galerie
