The 3-D animated owls in Ann Lislegaard’s video installation Oracles, Owls . . . Some Animals Never Sleep (2014) may have insights about the future, though the prophesies they share—often fragments of science-fiction novels or phrases from the I Ching—come in a jumble of languages and are further garbled by blasts of electronic noise. Sci-fi has been a point of departure for many of Lislegaard’s previous works; here, direct references to masters of the literary genre are intertwined with nods to other kinds of speculative practices. In the dense, cerebral world of Lislegaard’s oracular owls, J.G. Ballard mingles with Duchamp, Philip K. Dick with Hegel.
