Pierre Huyghe: Liminal

Liminal was Pierre Huyghe's major solo exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale — a museum-wide installation in which fifteen networked artworks formed a single interconnected system, responsive to each other and to live external data streams. Four of these works were new commissions, each nonlinear or interactive, developed from the ground up for the exhibition.

I served as Technical Director across the new commissions, from early development in early 2023 through the Venice opening in April 2024. I led a team of eleven developers and animators working across Unreal Engine, TouchDesigner, and Python. These new works included

• A self-editing film with a TouchDesigner backend that creates a new montage live with each playthrough in the exhibition.
• A set of wearable masks equipped with computer vision, each mask cataloguing its surroundings in real time and generating a speculative language based on what it observes.
• A hyper-realistic metahuman built from extremely high-resolution body scans and motion captured animation, driven by an Unreal Engine backend
• A live playback server with a facial recognition camera and sensors modulating the video sequencing in real-time based on the presence and movement of viewers

Lastly, I worked with the AV vendor to design and implement centralized control systems across the whole exhibition that allowed the full fifteen-work network to be monitored and maintained as a unified whole, while also coordinating the practical realities of a multi-week installation in Venice, where every piece of equipment arrives by boat and logistics become their own creative constraint.