Anticipation grows for what lies below as one walks down the winding staircase to the underground gallery space at Artechouse. Upon entering, the museum staff hand out little cloth booties that cover the bottoms of your shoes to protect the mirrored floor of the main gallery space, and visitors are immediately immersed in Italian art studio Fuse’s exhibition Everything in Existence. The exhibition showcases four projects from the past 10 years that aim to explore the concept of humanity's relationship to everything around us.
“Multiverse,” located in the Main Gallery, is a series of real-time generated 30-minute cycles projected in 260 degrees on 7-meter-high (23-foot-high) walls using OpenFramework to generate the graphics and Maximus P or Ableton Live for the audio. The artists also coated the floor of the main space with reflective paint to give the illusion of the work extending beyond the physical boundaries of the space, Fuse's website says.
The "Multiverse" installation "explores the evolution of infinite possible universes," according to Fuse's website. Tati Pastukhova, Artechouse’s managing partner and co-founder, says she likes to think of "Multiverse" as six photographs of the same face taken 10 minutes apart. “How the face changes, how the skin decays,” Pastukhova says, is similar to how the exhibition shows organic change and regeneration over time.
Mattia Carretti, an artist and executive producer at Fuse, says that the studio first experimented with the installation in a large church, which is where they began exploring the idea of the multiverse. “If our existence is only a concept of random, it’s a little bit different than thinking that our universe is something that has been created and designed for us, like by God. One [idea] feels safe and the other produces a bit more anxiety. Here," Carretti says, motioning to the morphing walls of the installation, "we tried to give to the people the sensation to be not safe.”
Pastukhova’s personal favorite of the exhibition is “Amygdala,” displayed in the Media Lab. This installation uses a computational process called Semantic Analysis to analyze real-time tweets and translate the data into an audiovisual representation of the internet's collective emotional state. To see it working live, she says, is “fascinating. ... Everything that we put out there, someone can go and access it.”
“Amygdala” even shows that amid the longest government shutdown in history, there is still a great deal of happiness around us, especially because Winter Is Here—the first trailer for season eight of Game of Thrones hit the interwebs three days ago. As #ForTheThrone continues its upward trend, the Amygdala installation displayed a visual representation of Twitter communities’ happiness, jumping from about 20 percent to about 70 percent, due to fan's anticipation of the show, in a single day.
Other highlights of the exhibition include “Clepsydra” in Gallery 1, which offers a visual representation of gravity, and “Snowfall” in the hallway-like gallery, which is an interactive set of eight ultra HD screens that outlines the silhouettes of viewers in what looks like falling snowflakes. "You have to immerse yourself,” Sandro Kereselidze, Artechouse’s artistic director and co-founder says of the installation, and the screens will immerse you.
Everything in Existence will run from Jan. 17 through March 10. Tickets are available for purchase for $8 to $15 online or $20 at the door.
