This exhibition explores Universal Everything’s fascination with the human form-the characteristics of the individual and our behavior as part of a larger collective. The early works shown on floor 2, Portrait II, Supreme Believers II, and Walking City focus on the individual body and its capacity to reshape, transform, and to adapt. The next group of works Tribes and Emergence explore the nature of the individual when subsumed within a larger group.If the first section of the exhibition is about the here and now, the works on floor 4 explore what the future might look like. Smart Matter, the first in the Hype Cycle series of films explores human-machine collaboration through performance and emerging technologies. Machine Learning shows us a new world where the machine is now autonomous creating new unpredictable forms of movement. Finally, Screens of the Future is a series of visionary prototypes, showcasing our increasingly integrated relationship with new technologies. (Conrad Bodman)
Portrait II
Digital brushstrokes rove around the canvas within the confines of a human form, causing occasional glimpses of a face to emerge. Portrait II draws on the processes of painting from dark to light that Universal Everything’s Creative Director Matt Pyke studied at art school, and takes inspiration from the rich, dark tones of Rembrandt. The result is a living portrait that can only be achieved and experienced on a digital canvas.
Supreme Believers II
A dance piece performed inside a CGI hurricane. A lone figure struggles to make his way across a sparse, grassy landscape, seemingly battling the elements as they beat him back. His body starts to decompose, surrendering to invisible physical forces, and he disappears into a cascade of particles.
Walking City
A slowly-evolving video sculpture, referencing the utopian visions of the 1960s architecture practice Archigram and investigating human movement. The language of materials and patterns found in radical architecture transform as the nomadic city endlessly walks, adapting its movement and form to the environments it encounters.
Tribes
Tribes continues Universal Everything’s longstanding investigation into choreography and rules of human behavior. Thousands of tiny people move in sync, forming connections, creating collective patterns on the landscape, and seemingly sharing common goals. Pictured from above, they are barely distinguishable from one another, a mass, fluid movement of color. Viewed close up, however, the individuals that make up the crowd are revealed, each following a unique trajectory. The piece explores autonomy, self-organization and group interrelationships, questioning the impact a crowd can have on the individual.
Emergence
Emergence is an open-world interactive audiovisual environment. Immerse yourself in a crowd of thousands as you explore the landscape's music. Across the infinite space, shafts of light beckon you closer. As you touch the light, the environment – its atmosphere, its gravity and the choreography of the crowd – evolves in surprising ways, all in response to the sound.
Smart Matter
Smart Matter is part of Hype Cycle, Universal Everything’s series of futurist films exploring human-machine collaboration through performance and emerging technologies. It builds on the studio's past experiments with motion studies, imagining a new form of collaborative interface for improvised modeling. These human-machine interactions are inspired by the Hype Cycle trend graphs produced by Gartner Research, an attempt to predict the phases of expectation and disillusionment regarding new technologies as they come to market.
Machine Learning
Machine Learning is part of Hype Cycle, a series of futurist films exploring human-machine collaboration through performance and emerging technologies. It asks: when will machines achieve human agility? A dancer teaches a series of robots how to move. As the robots’ abilities develop from shaky mimicry to composed mastery, a physical dialogue emerges between man and machine-mimicking, balancing, challenging, competing, outmaneuvering.
Screens of the Future
A series of visionary prototypes based on a range of emerging technologies including flexible displays, shape-shifting materials and context-aware functionality. These moving image artworks highlight humanity’s increasingly integrated relationship with technology, showing us what the near future might look like.
Artist: Universal Everything
Curator: Cornad Bodman
Photographs: Özge Balkan
You are all set!
Your first Culture Weekly will arrive this week.