Pipilotti Rist Moves Toward a Hippie Singularity at the New Museum

Over the past 30 years, the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist has used surprising tools, like micro spy cameras and an endoscope swallowed by one of her subjects, to comment on the ways we produce and consume images. “There is almost a dissolution between the borders of the bodies and the borders of technology,” says Massimiliano Gioni, a co-curator of ­“Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” (October 26 through January 8, 2017), at the New Museum, in New York. Spanning three floors, Rist’s lush, hypnotic videos and multimedia installations conjure kaleidoscopic dreamscapes that foster blissed-out communal experiences. “Pipilotti goes through the entire phenomenology of seeing, from today’s tiny screens to grand Cinemascope,” says Gioni, noting how Rist often positions the videos to appear not in front of the viewers but above and around them — “in a more spiritual way, like a church of television.”