Hito Steyerl puts a living world inside her AI cave

At Kunstmuseum Bonn, Hito Steyerl’s Animal Spirits combines AI-animated cave imagery with illuminated glass vessels containing plants. The 2022 work is on view through 31 December 2027.[1]

The title supplies a route through these apparently distant subjects. What gives people the confidence to begin something whose results they cannot yet know? The question applies to an investment, but also to the work of sustaining a shared space.

Confidence has a productive role

In Chapter 12 of The General Theory, John Maynard Keynes examines investment made with incomplete knowledge of future returns. He treats confidence as part of the decision itself. A forecast and the confidence placed in that forecast affect whether someone commits resources.[3]

Keynes gives animal spirits a productive role. He argues that a spontaneous inclination to act helps enterprise proceed when exact calculation cannot settle the matter. He also distinguishes developing a view of an asset’s long-term yield from anticipating what other investors will think about its price.[3]

That distinction lets the viewer separate commitment to sustaining something from excitement about its resale. Both can mobilise activity; they ask different things of the people who participate.

The plants can affect the picture

In the documented 2023 Berlin version, sensors measured proxies for plant health and detected visitor proximity. Their data influenced a particle cloud inside an animated cave. These details describe that installation; Bonn’s page does not specify the same sensor arrangement.[2]

Gardeners from Hevrîn Xelef and the refugee-support network Flamingo e.V. helped maintain its plants. The film connected interviews with shepherds and artists to decentralised systems, including fermentation.[2]

Our reading begins with a distinction: responsiveness does not imply self-sufficiency. Giving maintenance a visible place changes how autonomy can be understood. Instead of looking only for a single controlling mind, the viewer can consider the relationships that allow a system to carry on.

Fermentation offers a further question for the viewer: how does collective activity acquire an order? Bringing that question into the room changes the reading of decentralisation. Independence can describe freedom from one central controller while still requiring continuing exchanges among participants.

In Bonn’s account, a shepherd’s warnings about wolves stand for market competition.[1]

A spectacle can look self-sufficient. Following its dependencies gives an audience a different kind of agency: the ability to notice whose continuing effort makes apparent autonomy possible. That question remains after the image has changed.

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