Hito Steyerl’s 2019 AI garden was 0.04 seconds ahead

The future in Hito Steyerl’s Power Plants was extremely close. For the 2019 Serpentine exhibition in London, neural networks calculated the next video frame, producing images of plants presented as 0.04 seconds ahead of the viewer.[1]

That tiny interval gives the prediction a precise scale. The system was extending a moving image; the work’s larger questions came from the people and places around it.[1]

Outside the gallery, the associated Actual Reality OS app distorted architectural models according to local inequality data. Housing, austerity and workers’ rights appeared through community mapping, personal testimony and statistics. Inside, four films let research partners tell their own stories.[1]

Read together, the animated garden and those accounts ask what it means to make a future visible. A predicted image gives one kind of information; describing life in the neighbourhood depends on people who know it.[1]

The missing power source

Speaking to Osman Can Yerebakan for The Brooklyn Rail’s July/August 2019 issue, Steyerl described an intended centrepiece: a solar device on the roof, echoing Malevich’s Black Square, that would have supplied electricity for the show.[2]

The intended generator did not become part of the exhibition. When Yerebakan asked whether it worked, Steyerl said that the components derived from it existed but “the central component itself was missing”.[2]

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