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The lorries have arrived. The stuff for Philippe Parreno’s vast installation is being unloaded in Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall in London – screens, speakers, lights, computers, a carpet, a dish of yeast, and a dozen or so inflatable fish.

Parreno himself is dead on his feet with work… and worry. His factory-sized mobile – operated by algorithms derived from growing yeast, the  weather, the tides, the passage of planes, even the music from passing buskers – will not really be under his control.

And this is the point. Parreno’s recent landmark shows, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, were each granted a certain amount of autonomy once set in motion, but it’s Anywhen, at the Tate, that truly rips free of the artist’s guidance.

What will happen? “I genuinely don’t know,” Parreno concedes, as we huddle in the corner of a cafe nearby. He clicks through the wireframe diagram of the installation: “The hall is a unique space, quite unlike anywhere I’ve inhabited before. Until this work is set in motion, I simply won’t know whether it, well, works.”

A waiting game

Painters have it easy in the sense that a painting, even in a poor gallery, is still a painting.

Parreno’s medium is the actual mechanics of exhibition-making. His huge interconnected mechanical and media elements won’t actually cohere into a significant work of art for some days. By then – this is the idea – the rhythms and contingencies that operate its sounds, films, lights and the motions of its roof-mounted panels will have acquired a certain harmony. Unless, of course, they don’t.

Pity the plight of an artist whose art does not – indeed, cannot – exist at the time of its own press launch. Newspaper reviewers have so far been generous, not to say easily pleased, making much of the fish (glorified versions of the sort you can buy in any toy store), the architectonic white panels (which create shifting, mobile enclosures and sight lines: this gallery within a gallery literally cannot make up its mind what shape to be) and even the carpet (which, so far as we could judge, was, simply, a grey carpet).

This generosity may be necessary, but it rather misses the point of Parreno’s art – which is to set in motion a machine sufficiently complex to generate its own creative work from what are, we hope, rich enough initial conditions.

Art-tech tie-ups

In a rather grumpy report from September’s Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, we teased artists for their abrogation of responsibility. Given that making technology (be it in the form of hand axes, wheels, intercontinental ballistic missiles or gallery-spanning “biocomputers”) is something that human beings naturally do, there is something redundant about the idea of an artist “collaborating with technology”. It’s rather like being told that an Olympic runner is collaborating with her legs. “Well, obviously,” you may respond, nonplussed.  “And so…?”

Whether Parreno’s colossal installation will persuade us out of that grump with “sci-art”, we don’t yet know – and we won’t for some days. The wheels have only just started turning; the retorts, as yet, are barely bubbling.

But if Parreno can eventually be said to have succeeded, he’s going to need a different kind of critical response. Fluid. Slower. More reflective. And (sorry, dear reader, but there’s no getting around this) late.

For once, then, we encourage you to turn to the magazine issue of 22 October and catch a deeper snapshot of a piece of art that will forever be a work in progress.