9 Bury Street, SW1Y 6AB, London, United Kingdom
Open: Mon-Fri 10am-5.30pm
Artist: Miguel Chevalier
The human eye is no longer the only one looking at the world.
With Beyond Retina, Miguel Chevalier presents at The Mayor Gallery a new body of work exploring the profound transformation of vision in the age of artificial intelligence. For more than four decades, the artist has investigated the relationship between nature and artifice, as well as the invisible flows that shape our contemporary societies. This exhibition marks a significant new stage in his practice, shifting the focus from the image itself to the very nature of perception.
Beyond Retina explores the moment when vision ceases to be the exclusive privilege of the human eye and extends through intelligent cameras, algorithms, neural networks and AI systems. Seeing is no longer simply a matter of observing; it has become a process of analysing, recognising, mapping, predicting and connecting streams of information through AI. Our perception of the world is becoming hybrid, shared between biological intelligence and artificial intelligence.
The exhibition brings together robotic drawings, dye-sublimation digigraphs on aluminium engraved with laser technology, 3D-printed sculptures, video works on screen and an interactive installation. Together, these static and moving works create a sensitive cartography of the new forms of perception emerging in the twenty-first century.
The figures of Janus and the Tricephalic, presented both as two-dimensional works and as sculptures, draw upon the mythologies and spiritual traditions of many civilisations. They become metaphors for a new perceptual condition, in which human consciousness is no longer confined to biological vision but is extended through machines, algorithms and artificial intelligence. Their double and triple faces gaze simultaneously in multiple directions, across different temporalities and realities. They embody a post-human being existing between the physical world, virtual environments and mental space. In the age of social media, avatars and AI, they also evoke the multiplication of our identities and the coexistence of several simultaneous selves.
The works Retina AI and The Eye of the Machine further develop this reflection on the encounter between human perception and artificial vision. In The Eye of the Machine, the visitor's portrait is captured by a camera and instantly transformed through a tessellation algorithm based on Voronoi diagrams. The image becomes a constantly evolving field of data in which the face fragments, reconstructs itself and continually reinvents its form. Poetic yet unsettling, the work reveals how contemporary technologies analyse, deconstruct and reconstruct our identities, while questioning the new regimes of visibility created by facial recognition, Big Data and the algorithmic systems that increasingly shape our daily lives.
Through these works, Miguel Chevalier does not simply represent the digital world; he reveals its emerging modes of perception. Wireframe sculptures, voxelised faces and algorithmic forms create an aesthetic in which the brain becomes a landscape, vision becomes a network, and consciousness appears to extend beyond the human mind into intelligent machines.
Balancing poetry, speculation and anticipation, Beyond Retina offers a meditation on the transformation of the human condition. At a time when artificial intelligence are able to see, learn and interpret the world alongside us, the exhibition poses a fundamental question:
What does it still mean to see when vision is no longer exclusively human?
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