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Over the course of her career, Kurant, 43, has used electromagnetic fields to make stones float above their plinths and trained parrots to bark like dogs.īut that is what Kurant seeks to conjure in her work: the eerie, uneasy wonder we used to feel toward progress that augured new ways of life.

She has released fake currency into circulation and printed heat-sensitive newspaper with disappearing stories based on a clairvoyant’s predictions. She has created maps of nonexistent islands, periodic tables of collective delusions and ersatz fossils using sped-up geological processes as a form of “fiction writing.” Works like these are calibrated to reset viewers’ perceptions of reality, to conjure experiences that, if only for a minute, make the rest of the world look suddenly suspect. Kurant is fascinated by moments in which new developments - the agricultural revolution, the invention of writing, the advent of electricity - transform humanity, rewiring both individual brains and the collective unconscious. We are, she believes, living in such a moment, and her works give expression to the heady, ominous potential of our current evolution. “She’s actually interested in how technology becomes magical to most of us,” says Mary Ceruti, the executive director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, who organized Kurant’s breakout exhibition. “She’s interrogating both how seductive the magical part of it is and how potentially sinister the invisible parts are.” In an era when our digital selves are bought and sold, data mining has extended to our dreams, cellphones have practically become prostheses and algorithms determine whom we date, Kurant probes the uncertainties of the volatile present and unknowable future through projects that verge on scientific experiments. If technology is remaking individuals and society in ways we can barely articulate and certainly cannot predict, her projects examine the mechanisms driving these changes and where they may take us.

To create one of her best-known works, Kurant supplied termite colonies with unusual building materials: crystals, gold and neon sand.

Over the course of several months, the insects produced a glittering suite of knobby spires in electric shades of blue, violet, yellow, orange and green.