Chapter VIII: Hallucinations

Hallucinations brings together two distinct, yet convergent, artistic practices that examine how technologies shape perception, legibility, and the construction of reality. While Trevor Paglen unveils the invisible infrastructures that sustain contemporary vision, Troika investigates the systems we create to make the world appear more ordered and coherent than it truly is.

Across four galleries, Hallucinations traces a shared fascination with the ways humans, machines, and environments perceive, transform, and “dream” one another. The exhibition moves between data-driven vision systems, forests interwoven with electronics, and installations that evoke vegetal
intelligences, placing technological, natural, and perceptual structures into conversation. Paglen and Troika illuminate hidden architectures—algorithmic, biological, historical, and imagined—that organize the world we inhabit, often without our awareness. Their works chart shifting
forms of life and perception, revealing how the organic and the artificial continually influence and reshape one another.

In Anima Atman, Troika experiments with the premise that plants possess their own intelligence and consciousness. A group of thistles sprouts from a landscape of gleaming silicon rocks, moving almost imperceptibly, as if animated by a supernatural energy. This ambiguous vitality, situated between the
real and the imagined, turns the installation into a threshold where the familiar becomes strange. In Irma Watched Over by Machines, the impassive gaze of a camera documents the destruction caused by Hurricane Irma in 2017, confronting the natural force of catastrophe with the indifferent logic of the machine. Together, these works raise questions about non-human sensitivity, causality, and the act of observation.