Recipient Of The 2024 Innovator Award
Minneapolis-based Alison Hiltner expertly merges science fiction, technology, and the human experience into multimedia, experiential installations that embrace curiosity and a deep sense of wonder. Touch, time, and a keen sense of the absurd feature heavily in her works, provoking unusual connections and insights. Her process is fascinating, influenced by residencies in medical laboratories, ecological networks, and film. As we move deeper into the age of AI, ecological collapse, polarization, and the breakdown of consensual truth—scenarios that were once just the stuff of sci-fi—Hiltner’s constant questioning of reality and what it means to be human offers new ways of understanding ourselves and communicating with others.
Lauren Levato Coyne: Not to be stereotypical, but there is a strong mad scientist feel to your work, with its wires, lights, latex, stainless steel instruments, pumps, and lots and lots of goo.
Alison Hiltner: That makes me laugh because growing up, my parents only let me watch public television. PBS is wonderful. It gave me a really wild sense of humor and an amazing sense of wonder. I used to watch “Doctor Who” all the time and grew up idolizing him; he was literally a mad scientist, who did crazy things. My heroes were the Monty Python gang, David Attenborough, Doctor Who, Carl Sagan, and Jacques Cousteau. Our generation, Gen X, really grew up in a male-dominated world. Even though Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler were absolutely incredible, the men were pushed forward back then and always in our view.
LLC: We grew up with some amazing, campy science fiction. I see that influence on your work, but there’s also a high level of sophistication. You bounce from absurdity to speculation to poetry, often in one piece. Could you name some of the films that influenced you?
AH: My favorite sci-fi is a long list, but I’ll narrow it down to City of Lost Children, Blade Runner, After Yang, Another Earth, and, recently, The Assessment.
LLC: I have to ask about the goo, which plays an important role in many of your works. What is this strange and unusual material?
AH: It’s non-Newtonian fluid—a material that can hold more than one state; it can be a liquid or a solid according to the force exerted on it.
LLC: So, it’s about the behavior of a substance.
AH: Yes, a non-Newtonian fluid will behave like a liquid, but if you punch it or walk on it in a specific way it will behave more like a solid. Silly putty is a classic example. In a perfect world, I would work with a chemist to make a non-Newtonian fluid that wouldn’t dry out, that could drip and hang or stand still in a certain configuration. To be able to control it would be amazing. Instead, I learned a basic formula from a child on YouTube. It’s baking soda, contact cleaner, and clear Elmer’s glue. I just messed around with the ratio to get the right viscosity. It has a bit of a shelf life because the structures that I put it in are not completely airtight, so it dries out eventually.
LLC: How often do things fail?
AH: Some things last a year or more, others fail in less than six months. But to be honest, I don’t make anything to last; that’s not what I consider when I’m making something. I just want it to be what I want it to be, and I maneuver the consequences as much as possible. Am I the worst artist ever?
LLC: No, there’s something really beautiful about that. In today’s capitalistic hellscape, how much are we asking from art? How self-aggrandizing is it that we expect an artwork to last forever and for people to care if it does? You’re asking questions about the moment, ephemeral questions, and the point is to keep asking. If you made something fixed in time and space, you would be unable to keep asking questions.
AH: I’ve been railing against ChatGPT, not because I have any sort of fear of an AI takeover—maybe they will do a better job than human beings—but because of the environmental impact. This makes me want to scream from the rooftops, because even people who genuinely care about the environment can be completely oblivious to it. We really are incapable of change—just think how quickly we flipped back to business as usual after the pandemic.
LLC: It’s terrifying how much of an oblivion mindset surrounds us. Somehow we still romanticize technology and think it’s going to save us. For our entire lives, we’ve been hearing that the next technological thing—LMLs, AI, and chatbots, at the moment—is going to be the revolution, the utopia. But it never is. You, on the other hand, use technology to explore the self and human messiness. Your work is a rebuttal to the idea that technology can fix us or that we should all want to go live in the digital cloud.
AH: I am fascinated by this perception, because it’s kind of true. We have a rather mystical understanding of our existence. I want people to be more in touch with themselves, which is why I make all of this. I hope that I’m giving people permission to take a moment to know their bodies, because in many ways I’ve always found my body very useless. Not in a bad way, I don’t feel bad about it, but I’m so in my head that this body is annoying.
LLC: I understand that completely. I’m always envious when I see a disembodied, functioning head in horror movies. Except I would also want hands.
AH: I would like to control things with my brain.
LLC: In a way, that’s exactly what you are doing in We Have Merely Been Detected (2023). Could you explain how it works?
AH: This little beauty is an EEG-reading headset. It’s commercially available, which I think is strange, but that’s consumerism. They’re sold to Fortune 500 companies to study and increase worker productivity. But I want people to use this to understand their brains better. I hired someone to help me build the operational program.
When I slip it on, you can watch my brain. It focuses on connections; basically, blinking lights are good. The redder something is the more chaotic your thought patterns, whereas green means calm. Most of this tracks pretty low-level thinking. I’d have to vivisect myself before getting to the high, executive function aspects of the brain. It also makes movement connections. For instance, if I wave my arms, the lights begin to change, and talking or listening to music makes the connections more chaotic. Now it’s your turn: three green lights, and there’s your brain.
LLC: I feel like I’m controlling holiday lights. Let me tap my toes and snap at the same time.
AH: That’s a lot of red light. The only time I’ve seen it that red is with children. I have a theory that people who are neurodivergent can activate it in a similar way because there’s so much going on up there. People with ADHD tend to really light it up.
LLC: We have the head, and we also have the heart. How does Tethers (2020) work?
AH: I created Tethers so people could hold their own heartbeats. I worked in the cardiac lab at the University of Minnesota, which was intense and genuinely life-changing. It was a very strange residency; I loved it but found it equally bizarre. The doctor, whose research focused on pacemakers, was working with pigs’ hearts because they are the closest to human hearts, a controversial and unavoidable practice. He was implanting a device into a pig while I observed. I was hanging out in the lab watching experiments when the doctor said, “Alison, take off your gloves and come hold this heart.” So, I did—barehanded. I held the pig’s heart while it was still in the pig. Without thinking, I started bawling. It was so powerful that I couldn’t really hold on to it. He then said, “That’s what your heart is doing right now,” and I wondered, “How can we not feel that?” While this doesn’t replicate that intense power, it lets you keep your own heartbeat. It’s fascinating, I can tell the difference between your heart and my heart with Tethers.
LLC: You also work with plants in projects like Conversations About Time, Plant Memories of Light, and In Their Own Time, which featured in your exhibition “Our Lives Once Removed” (2024). What are you exploring here?
AH: After the pandemic, I was thinking, “Humans are the worst. I’m going to try to get to know plants better because I prefer them right now.” I want people to consider the idea of other organisms as inherently decent, like they think of themselves, I suppose, in order to become more in touch with the reality of being decent.
It’s amazing how calm we feel if we are somewhere around plants. We think of them as quiet and soothing. Many people who aren’t plant nerds believe them to be stationary, but they have a lot going on—they are loud and wild. They’re also really good liars. We tried to do EEGs on plants, but they were too noisy—it’s hard to isolate the reactivity of plants like you can with the human brain. It was almost impossible to make the coding structure do anything because plants are so everywhere, they are being organic. We need to figure out a way to filter the information somehow to enable us to see the activity. It’s hard though, because I don’t yet know enough about what kind of information we are gathering from the plant. That is part of the problem-solving involved in what any piece will ultimately become, figuring out all the variables along the way.
I’ve always been interested in plants. And the human body, too. Honestly, I’m pretty interested in humans even though they make me mad. I also see them as a threat. So, making these works becomes a self-preservation mechanism because I think that if I understand you, plant or human, then you won’t hurt me. And I wonder if that’s what plants think about us. What if plants are thinking, “If I understand you, you won’t hurt me?” I wish it were possible to know; I wish humans and plants could cross that divide and be sympathetic ears to each other.
