Can AI make intelligent art?

Pierre Huyghe's uncanny machine-human hybrids are the latest attempt to find deeper meaning in a technology that leaves many playing catch-up

- Amelia Tait

Two people dressed in black are kneeling on the floor, so still that they must surely be in pain. If they are grimacing, there would be no way to know - their features are obscured by oversized, smooth gold masks, as though they have buried their faces in half an Easter egg.

Their stillness makes them seem like sculptures, and only by checking for the subtle rise and fall of their chests can you confirm they are indeed human. Which is fitting - because they aren't actually human, at least not totally. They're human-machine hybrids, "Idioms", created by French artist Pierre Huyghe for his exhibition, Liminal, at the Punta della Dogana in Venice.

Idioms are wandering the exhibition for its run between March and November. Sensors in their masks monitor the rooms they sit in and visitors they encounter, and artificial intelligence will gradually convert this information into a brand new language-building a dictionary until they will even be able to communicate with one another. Every day, their knowledge will accumulate; Huyghe wonders what they might be able to say in 20 years' time.

Shortly before the exhibition opens to the public, two Idioms kneel in a darkened room opposite a large black box suspended from the ceilingthis is a "self-generating instrument", producing ambient music and crisscrossing beams of light. In response to the artwork in front of them, the Idioms appear to have only generated a few syllables, repeated as the LED screens on their foreheads glow gold.