Anicka Yi's floating Xenojellies take over Tate Modern

London's Tate Modern has unveiled a major new commission on 12 October which combines cutting-edge technology with art. The installation designed by Anicka Yi uses an autonomous, intelligent system to create a floating ecosystem above the heads of gallery visitors. She wants to explore how biology and technology can merge and wants viewers to question how machines could evolve to become independent forms of life

London: London's Tate Modern has unveiled a major new commission today which combines cutting-edge technology with art. The gallery visitors will get a glimpse of the art till 22nd January 2022. The installation designed by Anicka Yi uses an autonomous, intelligent system to create a floating ecosystem above the heads of gallery visitors like mechanical flying jellyfish.

For Achim Borchardt-Hume, a curator for the work as well as being Tate Modern's director of exhibitions the art echoes the past of this vast space, when the building was a power station and the hall housed huge turbines.

"Once there were a big machines here, the turbines in the industrial age, now they are these sort of somewhat futuristic biological machines here," he said.

"They're called aerobes - Xenojellies, the one with the tentacles, planulae, the ones that look more like blobs, and they move around the space guided by an artificial life system. So they are autonomous, they're not being controlled by people. Humans are neither masters of them, nor are they slave to them. It's an encounter of kinds."

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The aerobes emerge from behind a grey wall which they use to recharge their batteries. Once fully powered, they rise up and float out into the gallery, propelled on their journey by small rotors.

The aerobes give off scents - spices, marine smells, coal - connecting them with the history of the location and also emit gentle noises if you listen carefully.

"In the course of the pandemic, so all the things that happened over the past 18 months, many of the topics that Anicka raises have taken on a whole new meaning," said Borchardt-Hume.

"So questions like the politics of air, that we all breathe the same air together and what happens then, the fact that we are largely unaware to most life, bacterial life, fungal life that we carry within us, that we're made up out of it."

The machines react to various stimuli in the hall, making their behaviour almost impossible to predict and changed themselves according to what is happening beneath them.

Anicka Yi feels that artist likes to explore how biology and technology can merge and she wants viewers to question how machines could evolve to become independent forms of life.

With inputs from AP