Invisible Materials No. 1 (Air) 2022

Air, moving air, transparent polythene tubes,

4 fans, cargo slings, teensy, software,

tone generator and elements of the existing room.

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Like San Chapelle in Paris captures and colours light in an attempt to make the Divine visible, and to make tangible the presence of the unknown, so this work attempts to create spaces where the actual physical world can mesh and breath with the virtual world.

 

Invisible Materials No. 1 harnesses the power of unseen digital superstructures - in other words a few lines of the ubiquitous computer code that has acquired the power to manage our lives. In this work the ‘invisible superstructure’ infiltrates our physical world by moving the air within the room - the same air that surrounds us and that we take into our bodies with every breath.

 

The air is blown into and sucked out of flexible transparent tubes, altering their configuration. They crackle as they move around and occupy this human space. Each of the fans that moves the air generated an accompanying acoustic tone to create an episodic, polyphonic soundtrack that ranges from energetic fanfares of sound and movement to periods of complete silence and stillness as everything ‘rests’. Sometimes the tubes fill in reaction to physical stimulus (to your proximity perhaps), sometimes they move introspectively, their routine self-determined in an infinite series of combinations - that we might find comforting to interpret humanistically as breathing and pausing.

 

In various ways our attempt to reach an understanding of the world has always been intertwined with unseen forces - religious, mystical, imaginary, emotional, intellectual, natural, good and evil. Now we have digital, another invisible and pervasive force, that is altering the fundamental nature of the world and our relationship to it.