Talking to Pierre Huyghe for the Financial Times, 10 January 2026

“I don’t care what you say about these quantum technologies,” the French conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe told Berlin-based curator Bettina Kames, “I don’t buy it.”

Quantum sensors and quantum computers exploit the blurriness of the world at the smallest achievable scale, where, among other oddities, unobserved particles may share properties and occupy more than one position at once. By exploring many possibilities in tandem, they can perform calculations and take measurements that are otherwise fundamentally impossible. With them we’ll revolutionise drug discovery, secure global communications, understand the climate and accelerate artificial intelligence.

But what use is all that to an artist? “People are usually fascinated and intrigued by this field,” says Kames, the co-founder of LAS Art Foundation in Berlin, a roving gallery of future-facing, interdisciplinary work. Kames was out to commission a piece on the quantum realm but found Huyghe “quite critical.”

“Quantum science and technology is a battlefield,” Huyghe tells me from his studio in Santiago, Chile. He says this with some relish: whatever his artistic reservations, there’s no denying his appetite for a field notorious for its “weirdness”. “Everything about it gets cast as analogy and metaphor because the researchers are still having a hard time putting their achievements into words and formulas. There is some agreement, but also a lot of argument.

The problem, I suggest to the quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco — architect of the European Union’s quantum strategy, and collaborator on Huyghe’s latest artwork — is that we can’t simply point to the odd things happening at such a tiny scale. The quantum realm involves structures smaller than the wavelength of light, so there’s no way we can actually experience them with our senses.

Only it turns out — as Calarco explains with a grin — that we can.

An atom throws off a photon whenever one of its electrons jumps with seeming randomness from one orbit to another; the human eye is sensitive enough to detect this constant flickering. “It’s the only time in your life you will ever see an effect without a cause.”

Back in the lab, Calarco’s job is to protect the parts of quantum computers from this sort of interference. He wondered how you could visualise working, not just with one atom, but with dozens arranged in a lattice, as in a quantum computer. “I had no idea Bettina had Pierre Huyghe on her list of potential collaborators. When I heard, I said: I’m catching the first plane to Chile.”

In Paris in 2013, Calarco, at a loose end, had wandered into Huyghe’s retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. “I was blown away by the depth of each piece, by their variety, by their overarching coherence.” Huyghe had retained the walls and labels from the previous exhibition (a retrospective of artist Mike Kelley), arranging his work so that new art appeared to grow out of the decay of the old. One piece, Zoodram, featured a hermit crab living inside a bronze replica of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse. Rather than have a museum display his art, Huyghe’s art had taken over the museum. “It was overwhelming.”

Kames set up a Zoom call between the pair, and witnessed their instant connection. Huyghe talks now about Calarco’s “beautiful mind”; Calarco talks about Huyghe’s “genius”.

The proof will be in the piece, a large-scale installation dominated by a “monstrous unthinkable” — the faceless protagonist of an enormous hour-long, 9X9-metre film.

In Halle am Berghain, a vast industrial space adjoining the notorious Berlin nightclub, quantum properties will be transposed into sensory information, encompassing sound, vibration, dust, and light. “Pierre embraced the idea of using the quantum computer as an actual instrument,” Calarco explains. “We pluck the machine like a string.” The “string” here is the energy field between atoms. Pulling atoms away from each other yields a reverberation that can be picked up by an electrical circuit.

“For the first time, we’ll hear the sound of a quantum computer,” Calarco says. “It’s one of the biggest achievements of my career.”

“Liminals” is merely the latest stop on Huyghe’s magical mystery tour of a charming but indifferent cosmos. For Huyghe, fiction is the lens through which we see reality most clearly — that idea has provided the artist with rich pickings throughout his career. Take 2002’s “L’Expédition Scintillante”, the fictional tale of an expedition to Antarctica, told through an epic exhibition comprising indoor fog, a melting ice ship, and a twirling ice skater.

Other pieces have been artfully daft. In 1999, Huyghe and frequent collaborator Philippe Parreno purchased the rights from a Japanese design compay to AnnLee, a wide-eyed purple-haired female manga character, for a few hundred dollars. They then handed over the avatar to other artists to use in any way they wished, creating animations in which AnnLee wanders a lunar landscape, or recites Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Finally in 2002 AnnLee was “terminated”, buried in a coffin constructed out of parts from Ikea’s Billy bookcase.

In the last decade or so, Huyghe has been less interested in creating fictions; now his artworks pretty much force you to make up stories of your own.[are there quotes from Huyghe we can bring into this section or around it, just to bring his voice more into this biographical bit?] “We construct fiction to turn chaos into cosmos. Fiction is our tool to survive,” he says. “Without it, we would be confronted with the reign of contingency. The world would be quite literally unthinkable. Fiction is a mask we put on everything, but at the same time it’s the lens bringing to world into focus.”

At the Documenta 13 exhibition in 2012, in Kassel, Germany, he created “Untilled”, a “live construct ecosystem” in a compost heap, populating it with ant nests, psychotropic plants, a sculpture of a nude woman with a live beehive for a head, and an albino dog with a pink leg named “Human” that roamed the installation. The idea behind “Untilled” was to create an artwork that possessed a life of its own, separate from human attention.

Huyghe has been refining this proposition ever since. For 2018’s Uumwelt at London’s Serpentine Gallery he collaborated with informatician Yukiyasu Kamitani at Kyoto University, Japan, to look into our minds. Images conjured to mind by volunteers in MRI scanners were used to train learning models, and these models then tried to interpret what a diffferent set of volunteers were thinking about. Keeping up with the blizzard of disjointed, surreal images spilling from five huge screens forced viewers into an hallucinatory state. People stumbled out convinced they’d seen something. No one could agree what it was.

Huyghe’s 2014’s film “Untitled (Human Mask)” features a masked monkey, dressed as a young girl and trained as a waiter, tootling about an abandoned cafe. It is Huyghe’s most celebrated piece, and also the most misrepresented. Yes, it’s “about” being unaware of the role one plays in the world. But it’s much more a trap for the viewer: you can’t help but read human intentionality into what that monkey’s up to. You can’t help but make up stories.

“I think we are deeply chimeric and deeply monstrous and we’re made out of bits of mask. That is what I was trying to say,” Huyghe explains. “But it’s not a discovery that should be depressing! There’s joy to be had in being artificial.” Artifice is our species’ special talent, after all: “Was it Mallarmé called us ‘feux d’artifice’ — fireworks?.”

There’s no getting at the real; the trick is to find joy in the attempt.

In an enormous industrial space that resounds to the twanging of quantum-scale strings — a cacophony of causes without effects — Huyghe’s gigantic filmic protagonist tries to know itself. This generated figure, says Huyghe, is “a speculative fiction on a meaningless condition — a human-like membrane inseparable from the environment it is in.”

A modish idea? Perhaps: but it’s bread and butter to the physicist Tommaso Calarco. You look into the quantum realm and you see a world that doesn’t need you. So you try to understand it. You tell stories about it, come up with analogies, metaphors. You engage with it, “and you feel alive. You wake to your own agency, your own consciousness,” Calarco says. It’s what made him such an admirer of Huyghe’s art. “The work doesn’t try to sell you anything. It doesn’t need your attention. It interests you, and you make it yours.”