Inside Tranen in Hellerup, north of Copenhagen, Louis Morlæ builds Walls at the World’s End, three robotic walls that roll into new formations on carts driven by live data pulled from the internet.
For his first solo show in the Nordic region, Louis Morlæ turns the Danish art venue Tranen, in Hellerup, into a machine for generating visions of the end of the world. His subject is the tech industry that built the world as it stands, and the artificial intelligence now dismantling it. Dreams of progress have curdled into ambitions of disruption, the old start-up motto “move fast and break things,” once Mark Zuckerberg’s, hardened into a theory of society.
Born in Australia and based in London, Morlæ works with whatever the moment offers: AI, video generators, 3D printing, robotics, new materials, collaborators. From them he makes sculpture, film, music and machines with an aerospace engineer’s precision. Toke Lykkeberg, who directs Tranen and shaped the show, reads the results as status reports from the “engine room” of civilization.
The show turns on three mobile walls on wheels: The First Wall (BassRelixx), The Second Wall (SloptomistPriime) and The Third Wall (pDoomDaddy). Each is a slab of PIR board with perspex siding and steel brackets, riding a four-wheeled cart fitted with lights, mimicking the fixed walls of the room. An inscrutable AI harvests live data from the internet and shunts them into new configurations, working from paired concepts of its own: the fence and the horizon, the furnace and the tide. The logic is opaque even to Morlæ, as the systems now steering daily life have grown opaque to their own engineers.
On the move, the walls behave like self-driving cars crossed with bumper cars, switching modes and sometimes colliding; the engineer who built the vehicles Morlæ designed comes from the show Robot Wars. As they travel they open passages and throw up barriers, deciding how anyone crosses the room, making the infrastructure they use.
Above them hangs SFB03 (Larsen), a stitched airbag of silicone-coated nylon banded in high-visibility panels, fed by a blower through flexible tubing and studded with lights. It reads as a kill switch, the kind meant to shut down a robot or an AI, and when inflated it crowds the floor and shrinks how far the walls can travel. Lykkeberg sees in it both the industry’s promised safety and pure hot air, the vow to let the genie out of the bottle and coax it back, as easily as a balloon is pumped and let down.
The end arrives, finally, in three films. Grouped as The Fourth Wall, they imagine rather than forecast, closer to the “hallucinations” that AI hands its users than to prediction. One trails an individualist in the mould of Peter Thiel, lost in a warped version of his own futures; another visits an eco-collective whose techno rave is cut short by an alien abduction; the last sees a post-human, multispecies world through the eyes of ecstatic bees. Each used the newest generator on the market, testing the worldview each tool allows. The show offers many endings for the known world and no answer about what waits beyond.
