With its female form crowned by a beehive head home to a colony of honeybees, Pierre Huyghe’s Exomind (Deep Water) is an artwork in constant formation. The work favors an open-ended condition, subject to natural elements, in which artist and nature are coauthors. The beehive embodies a form of self-organizing intelligence common in nature. Also called “swarm intelligence,” it has informed concepts of emergent and collective intelligence in the social sciences and inspired such terms as “hive mind.” Natural forms of swarm intelligence have also served as models for the design of artificial intelligence systems. Huyghe’s work functions like a living algorithm: its evolution is driven by its colony of worker bees, who scan the environment and mine it for nectar like a line of code harvests data. Embodying a vision of intelligence that bridges the categorical divide between human, nature, and machine, the work gestures toward the multiplicity of subjectivities that constitute the world.

Exomind (Deep Water) is on view every Thursday through Sunday and the first Tuesday of the month, subject to weather conditions. As the bees need warmth to thrive, the sculpture is covered on cold or windy days.