Everything in Existence is an adventure from the known world into unknown possibilities.
The exciting new show at ARTECHOUSE, until March 10, is the first North American solo exhibition for the internationally-acclaimed Italian artist studio fuse*. The 10-year retrospective features four installations by artists Mattia Carretti and Luca Camellini, who created these works with software that processes data derived in real time from light, space, sound and social media.
First staged in a deconsecrated church in historic Parma, Italy, Multiverse in the Main Gallery consists of 130-foot wide by 24-foot high projections, with a reflective floor service which generates the vertical images. There is a sequence of real-time generated digital paintings which represent the eternal birth and death of infinite universes to convey the sense of boundless space. As each sequence ends, “genetic information” of the last sequence triggers an evolutionary transition for the exploration of new possibilities in the next sequence.
Amygdala (or almond) relates to the roughly almond-shaped mass in our brain involved with the experiencing of emotions.This installation in the Media Labis a live data audio-visual installation that uses time to record digital social channels and networks worldwide. Using a vocabulary of 5,000 words which are assigned colors that the artists have chosen to correspond to emotions (happy, sad, disgust, annoyed, fearful), the collective states of mind of social media users is translated and transformed into visual images that are shared at any given time.
Two side galleries feature smaller unique works.
Snow Fall is the earliest of these works. First exhibited at the Palazzo Santa Margherita in Modena, it captures silhouettes of people with video cameras in real time. The fall of snowflakes block the forms that they cast onto the gallery wall.
Clepsydra, deriving its name from the ancient Greek word for a timepiece that measures through the regular flow of water, is a mental construct to measure time and our relation to gravity. This installation uses the close connection between audio and video to immerse the visitors in a non-place, crossed conceptually by sounds and images which shift from one universe to another.
ARTECHOUSE has set up a kiosk with information at the entrance of the exhibition space to explain some of the mysteries in the interplay between the visible human involvement and the invisible algorithmic software for the creation of each of the artworks. Entering the gallery is the experience itself, one that parallels the relationship between humans and the mysterious, vast and incomprehensible forces beyond the limits of the known world. This is what the artists have stated is their intention in inspiring interconnectedness—the belief that we are all part of everything in existence.
By Sheila Wickouski