Rethinking Borders: The Living, the Non-Living, and Technology in Pierre Huyghe’s Work

Kathrin Maurer is Professor for Culture and Technology at the University of Southern Denmark. In her talk, Kathrin examines how Pierre Huyghe’s recent artworks challenge and destabilise borders between human and non-human life forms, as well as distinctions between the living and the non-living, the biological and the technological. Drawing on the concept of the bio-machine, she argues that Huyghe’s aesthetic environments function not merely as representations of life but as generative assemblages in which humans, animals, organic matter, artificial intelligence, and technical systems interact and co-evolve. Huyghe’s works propose life as a relational process of becoming, offering a non-anthropocentric perspective that reconfigures boundaries of life and agency.

The presentation will be followed by a discussion with the Öresund Comparative Borderland Research Group, and questions from participants. 

• When: 13.00-14.00 CET, Wednesday 4 November, 2026
• Where: LUX:C436, Helgonavägen 3 in Lund, or on Zoom: lu-se.zoom.us/j/62293187339?pwd=IqzuLm3dkTj6V2a37OjbwJ5yNI4w0q.1
• How: This seminar is open to all. You do not need to register in advance. 

Kathrin Maurer

Kathrin Maurer is employed as Full Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Southern Denmark, and her research is focused on visual art, surveillance technology, and nineteenth-century culture. She is the current PI of “The Aesthetics of Biomachines and the Question of Life” (a research cluster sponsored by The Velux Foundations). She has published the monograph The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities (MIT Press, 2023) and co-edited the handbook The Aesthetics of Machine Vision: Critical Terms and Ideas (MIT Press, 2026).

This seminar is funded by CEMES.