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SUMMARY:Agnieszka Kurant RECURSION
UID:https://instytutpolski.pl/newyork/2026/01/27/agnieszka-kurant-recursion/
LOCATION:
DTSTAMP:20260206
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Warsaw:20260206
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Warsaw:20260321
DESCRIPTION:Friday, February 6 – Saturday, March 21Marian Goodman Gallery385
Broadway, New York, NY 10013
RECURSION is Agnieszka Kurant’s second solo exhibition with the
gallery. The exhibition brings together new and recent works—speculative
thought experiments developed in collaboration with scientists, linguists,
engineers, and philosophers.
Kurant’s conceptual practice investigates collective and nonhuman
intelligences, the future of labor and creativity, and forms of
exploitation embedded in digital capitalism. Her work examines how forms
such as termite mounds, tools, languages, and social movements emerge
through collective agency. In the complex systems she creates, molecules,
bacteria, animals, AI algorithms, and human crowds interact to generate
unstable, hybrid forms in constant transformation, like living organisms.
Her projects draw on automation, cybernetics, and the processes of
networked value creation in the digital economy and address the global
labor extraction underlying artificial intelligence. Grown or shaped at the
molecular level, her works oscillate between biological and digital,
natural and artificial, life and nonlife.
The exhibition examines how digital capitalism converts human culture into
a reservoir of data and renders us all part of a network of vast, recursive
machines. Corporations such as Google absorb and recompute user data within
feedback systems that forecast behavior; automate decisions; and preempt,
monetize, and weaponize probabilistic futures. These processes in turn
transform the human mind and the collective unconscious. RECURSION
emphasizes how forecasting the future can actively shape it.
Kurant’s works draw on recursive and self-organizing phenomena, ranging
from the biological evolution of living systems to brains, languages,
social organizations, currencies, markets, and states. The artist
investigates the recursive nature of digital images as “metabolic
media”[1] eating the future: scraped, recomputed, and folded back into AI
systems, these images extract energy, labor, and attention to train
predictive algorithms in an endless feedback loop.
On the gallery’s street-level window is Future (Invention), 2024/2026, a
constellation of the word future translated into fourteen languages. The
work explores how different cultures spatially conceive of futurity:
speakers of Aymara, Māori, Darija, Malagasy, and Yupno understand the
future as coming from behind, above, or below—rather than lying ahead, as
in dominant Western worldviews. The installation highlights how language
shapes our thinking and invites viewers to imagine futures grounded in
other cosmologies. The work references America Invention (1993) by artist
Lothar Baumgarten.
At the center of the exhibition are Uncomputables (2026), an installation,
and Unthoughtforms (2026), a set of suspended sculptures. Both are inspired
by the experiments of British cybernetician Gordon Pask, who believed
living systems can solve problems in ways that exceed human thinking. Pask
developed “chemical computers”—electrochemical systems that modeled
aspects of the brain and social organizations. He conceived computational
problem-solving as a physical process in which solutions emerge through
chemical interactions rather than abstract calculations. In his
experiments, he grew metal crystals in copper sulfate solutions by passing
electric currents through electrodes to form branching filaments in
self-organizing feedback systems. Kurant reactivates these experiments in
an aquarium where metal, tree-like forms grow in response to AI-harvested
real-world socio-political and economic data, which are parsed and
converted into electric current flows and sound vibrations by a
computer-controlled system. Each structure records an emergent idea or
solution as a physical abstract form—a crystallization of something yet
unthought.
Recursivity, 2024/2026, presents a chameleon inside a terrarium whose glass
panes are replaced by mirrors. Cast in bronze and coated with liquid
crystals—a material used in LCD screens that fluctuates between states of
matter—the sculpture draws on a riddle posed by Stewart Brand to
cybernetician Gregory Bateson in 1973: What would a chameleon do when
confronted with its own reflection? Here, the chameleon’s skin
pigmentation is altered by a custom AI system that processes data from
millions of social-media users speculating about the future and converts it
into thermal and electrical signals. The work stages a perpetual mirror
test, involving viewers in a recursive loop of looking and data production
and reflects humanity’s entanglement in shaping, and being shaped by, its
own predictions of the future.
Alien Internet, 2023/2026, features a shape-shifting cybernetic organism
animated within an electromagnetic field. The work uses ferrofluid, a
material developed for NASA in 1963, whose tiny magnetic particles lend it
the properties of multiple states of matter. The evolving quasi-life-form
is continuously reshaped by behavioral data (e.g., migrations) from
millions of wild animals, including whales, bats, elephants, and sponges.
This data, tracked globally through digital technologies (including AI,
GPS, drones, and remote sensing), is used to predict earthquakes,
pandemics, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, resulting in a planetary
sensing surveillance system. Alien Internet conceives of millions of
nonhuman organisms mutating into a single, sentient communication network,
a collective biological computer-mind.
Adjacent Possible, 2021, explores alternative evolutionary paths of human
culture by fusing Paleolithic technologies with artificial intelligence.
Kurant collaborated with paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger and
computational social scientist Justin Lane to train an AI algorithm on
thousands of Paleolithic graphic signs that, dating from 40,000 BC to
14,000 BC, make up the earliest known forms of symbolic communication. The
algorithm then generated new signs that could have emerged from the same
collective subjectivity. To inscribe these signs on stone, Kurant worked
with a synthetic biologist and used pigments produced by genetically
engineered bacteria and fungi, an homage to the “living pigments” of
the Gwion Gwion rock paintings in Australia preserved over 40,000 years by
microbial activity.
Phantomatics, 2026, a looped film presented in the adjacent gallery,
extends Kurant’s exploration of artificial and cross-species languages,
and draws on philosophical zombies, a thought experiment that imagines
beings physically identical to humans but lacking conscious experience.
Developed with computational linguist Gasper Beguš, Phantomatics uses AI
trained on linguistic data from thousands of languages worldwide to
generate entirely new ones, each with its own distinct grammar and syntax.
In the film, samples of these new languages are spoken by simulated voices
and interspersed with alien-sounding vocalizations generated by training
the algorithm on sounds of whales, spiders, elephants, and other animals.
The uncanny result emulates a machine learning to speak, resembling the
acquisition of language by children. The work’s title is a reference to
Stanisław Lem’s concept of “phantomatics”—the creation of
artificial realities in which self-generating languages evolve without
human speakers. The synthetic entities we hear in Phantomatics have no
world and none of the social relations necessary for the emergence of
language and the self.
Also in the adjacent rear gallery is the series Risk Landscape, 2024, a
suite of holograms depicting forecasted financial, political, and climate
events in locations such as Florida, Luxembourg, Lviv, Gaza, and Doha.
Developed with data scientists and catastrophe-modeling specialists, the
work, which borrows its title from financial risk management, uses AI to
simulate near- and long-term scenarios of measurable and immeasurable
threats, including natural disasters, geopolitical conflict, financial
crises, and terrorism. The project exposes how AI-based corporations
monetize speculative futures—phantom abstractions detached from fact and
grounded instead in statistical probability.
In Sentimentite, 2022, Kurant created a new mineral by pulverizing and
mixing sixty objects that historically functioned as currencies, including
Rai stones, shells, whale teeth, corn, detergent, stamps, tea, batteries,
playing cards, electronic waste, soap, and cigarettes. Working with
computational social scientists, the artist employed AI sentiment-analysis
algorithms to harvest and aggregate emotional responses to major political,
social, and ecological events from hundreds of thousands of Twitter and
Reddit posts. She then used these responses to shape one hundred evolving
digital fragments of this new quasi-geological formation. When redeemed,
these digital NFT tokens state-change into the physical forms cast in
Sentimentite. The work examines how predictions about resource value
recursively shape that value. The holographic short film Wordoid, 2026,
uses experimental technology to present a collective neural state emerging
from a wordless conversation between multiple minds. In collaboration with
neuroscientists Adam Horowitz, Antoine Bellemare, and Philipp Tolke, Kurant
used hyperscanning to record brain activity from several participants
simultaneously. Brain signals from this “conversation,” related to
nonverbalized mental states that range from feelings of pain and joy to
sensations of a given color or smell, are processed directly by AI and
mapped into latent space to generate three-dimensional forms. The algorithm
learns to maximize inter-brain synchrony, creating a closed-loop
neurofeedback system. Wordoidexplores preverbal intelligence and speculates
on future modes of communication that bypass language and vision, offering
a glimpse into collective personhood, extended minds, and transformations
of human consciousness.
A comprehensive monograph, Agnieszka Kurant: Collective Intelligence, was
published in December 2025 by Sternberg Press. Edited by Stefanie Hessler,
Jenny Jaskey, and Kurant, it includes texts by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev,
Rosi Braidotti, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Nicolas Bourriaud, Kate
Crawford, Caroline A. Jones, Nora Khan, Jussi Parikka, Matteo Pasquinelli,
and Elvia Wilk, among others.
Kurant’s work is currently featured in Data Dreams: Contemporary Art in
the Age of AI, at the MCA Sydney through April 27, 2026. It will also be
shown in exhibitions at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and MAAT Museum,
Lisbon (2026). 
Her recent solo exhibitions include MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); Kunsthal Gent
(2023); Kunstverein Hannover (2023); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2022); and
SculptureCenter, New York (2013). She has realized commissions for the
façade of the Guggenheim Museum (2015) and for MIT List Visual Arts
Center, Cambridge (2021–22). Kurant’s work has also been shown at
Gwangju Biennale (2024); Sydney Biennale (2024); Centre Pompidou and
Pinault Collection – Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2024); Gropius Bau,
Berlin (2024); Louisiana Museum, Denmark (2023); Munch Museum, Oslo (2023);
Dhaka Art Summit (2023); MoMA and SFMOMA (2021); Nottingham Contemporary
(2021); Kunsthalle Wien and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Istanbul
Biennial and Triennale Milano (2019); Guggenheim Bilbao (2017); The Kitchen
(2016); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011); and
Performa Biennial, New York (2009).
Kurant was the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award and the 2019 Frontier
Art Prize.
Image credit: Agnieszka Kurant, Recursivity 1 (detail), 2024, bronze,
museum glass, liquid crystal pigments, heat sinks, Peltier elements,
artificial intelligence, custom software, computer, AC, custom pedestal,
33.8 × 29.5 × 51 in. (86 × 75 × 130 cm), courtesy of the artist and
Marian Goodman Gallery; photo by Nicolas Brasseur, courtesy of Pinault
Collection – Bourse de Commerce, 2025.
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