Soon at the SCHIRN: Troika. Buenavista
02/20/2025
6 min reading time
What is a “nice view” for an artificial intelligence? The SCHIRN presents from March 7 to April 21, 2025 an immersive, site-specific installation by the Troika collective.
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Troika’s work explores the shifting boundaries between nature and artificiality, the real and the romantic, the living and the nonliving. The German-French collective examines how new technologies affect our relationship with the world. Founded in 2003, Troika—comprised of the artist trio Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer, and Sebastien Noel—works across various media, including sculpture, film, installation, and painting. For the SCHIRN, the group developed a site-specific, immersive installation combining new and existing works, which appeal to different senses of perception. They explore alternative forms of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they probe the understanding of place in a more-than-human world. The exhibition reflects upon earthly and otherworldly landscapes and the transformation of nature in the twenty-first century through the rise of technology.
How does technology filter the perception of nature? What forms of life shall take root in such mediated landscapes? The installation “Buenavista” conjures the environmental imagination of an alternative intelligence, one whose dreams are shaped by human memories and fantasies. Spectacular scenes of nature flash across screens and decorate computer desktops: palm-fringed beaches, ice sheets punctuated by lakes of turquoise meltwater, rippling sand dunes under starry skies. Forests are surveilled by cameras perched in treetops, on the watch for storms and wildfires. Climate models predict long-term changes in the biosphere. In a society saturated with digital images, descriptions, and simulations, Troika’s work presents a vision of environmental yearning that transcends human embodiment.
A reflection on non-human forms of consciousness
As developments in artificial intelligence rapidly advance, conceptions of human intelligence and agency are shaking and shifting. In place of objective and readily quantifiable human characteristics, there emerge intimations of other-than-human modes of awareness, coordination, and intention. What if plants show purpose and altruism, or demonstrate a sense of kinship much like animals? What if technological advancements in robotics and computation wander astray from the imperatives of efficiency, speed, and optimization for which they were programmed? Might emerging intelligences amplify or, alternatively, resist the extractive tendencies that drive the present environmental crisis?
Dehlia Hannah, curator of the exhibition, remarks: “One once had to rise at dawn or climb a mountain and immerse oneself in the world to access a ‘beautiful view.’ Today, such images are delivered to our phones and computers in a constant stream of enticement. From advertisements for tourism to reports of environmental catastrophes, we scroll through the planet’s extremes. Have the landscapes of fantasy ever felt so close—or so far away? If subjectivity is shaped in relation to our environs, who are we becoming? The artist collective Troika follows these questions in an immersive new installation which allows us to perceive shifting boundaries in the present and imagine a more-than-human world with all our senses.”
The exhibition “Buenavista” combines new and existing works by Troika in a site-specific immersive experience. The exhibition space is illuminated by the shifting spectrum of light of “Ultra Red, Evergreen, Ocean Blue” (2024). Representing a macro version of the array that typifies the digital images through which we encounter the world, the south-facing semicircular window of the exhibition space is divided into three monochromatic zones of red, green, and blue.
An alternative intelligence in changing landscapes
In the interior of the space, an expansive landscape centers around two newly conceived works: “Buenavista” (2025), a computer-animated film, which gives the exhibition its title, is paired with the multichannel sound installation “I Am a River” (2025). It shows a constantly changing panoramic landscape with an enigmatic figure in the foreground covered with long brown hair. It is a recurrent protagonist from Troika’s oeuvre, an alternative intelligence in the form of an industrial Kuka robot. The figure stretches upward, whirling furiously as a flood of images flashes across the screen, transforming the landscape into a rapidly shifting collage of sand, ice, trees, and geological formations. “Buenavista” parodies the manic inattention of scrolling and clicking through disjointed elements in search of the most “beautiful view” and mirrors human environmental desires.
As it seeks choreographic attunement with the world around it, the spinning motion of the furry robotic figure is accompanied by the sound piece “I Am a River”. The poetic incantation inspired by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Rumi evokes the meditative practices of whirling or turning practiced by Sufi dervishes. The dizzying transformation of the landscape is echoed in the acoustic transformation of the text, which slips in and out of intelligibility to the human ear by using different frequencies.
“Have the landscapes of fantasy ever felt so close—or so far away?”
Dehlia Hannah
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As part of the surrounding landscape, “Anima Atman” (2024) is included. Clusters of thistle plants move in the manner of a slow-motion film with a degree of aliveness that seems unnatural. The work exploits the perceptual qualities of flickering LED light for the human sensory apparatus, so as to challenge cognitive biases and, ultimately, the capacity to recognize nonhuman agency, questioning the boundary between fantasy and technological illusion.
Three paintings from the series “Irma Watched Over by Machines” (2023) show the destruction wrought by Hurricane Irma, which hit the Caribbean in 2017, as seen through environmental monitoring systems in the RAW format (unprocessed digital images). The series is inspired by Richard Brautigan’s techno-utopian poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (1967). Scenes of the natural catastrophe broke down in colored-coded pixels and painted in a limited palette of sixteen shades of red, green, and blue reflect the impassive view of the camera. By coming into view of the human sensorium, these images in turn raise questions of witnessing, causality, and responsibility.
