A simulated lynx plays 24 hours a day in a London window
Contact Zone (Level 3) by Miriam Simun is a 12-minute game-engine simulation at The Window, the CHANEL Culture Fund's public art site on Bruton Street.
- When
- Through Jan. 3, 2027 (24 hours a day)
- Where
- The Window, Time & Life building, Bruton Street, London
Contact Zone (Level 3) is a new work by the artist Miriam Simun, showing at The Window, a public art site run by the CHANEL Culture Fund at the Time & Life building on Bruton Street in London. It is on view 24 hours a day through Jan. 3, 2027. This is the work's first public showing.
The piece runs 12 minutes. At its center is a GPS-collared lynx reintroduced into the Swiss Alps as part of a wider European rewilding effort. Simun generated the work through a game-engine simulation that links four things: the lynx, a forest biome, a gut microbiome and AI neural networks. The creatures and settings onscreen are composites of all four. Stills show a snowbound forest lit by a camera-trap flash, a red tunnel lined with cells and a lynx's face pressed close to the lens.
Simun's page for the work ends on a question: if observing, analyzing and intervening in rewilding were left entirely to AI, what kind of nature would emerge? Simun announced the showing on Oct. 8.
It is the third entry in a series. Contact Zone (Level 1), from 2024, is an endlessly iterating computer-generated animation that streams 24 hours a day as a live forest webcam. Contact Zone (Level 2) is a four-channel video installation.
Earlier artists at The Window include LuYang, Cao Fei, Jakob Kudsk Steensen and Universal Everything.
Stills from Contact Zone (Level 3). Images: Miriam Simun
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