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Open: Tue-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 11am-4pm

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Artist: Davide Bernardis

Curated by Carmen Lael Hines

Materia is an audio-visual installation which seeks to excavate entangled and expanded vocabularies for redefining how art and science can collaboratively re-approach the most urgent planetary challenges of our time.The viewer is led through a series of uncanny landscapes distributed across three visual-sound layers. These ‘worlds’ enmesh to form an evolving study of the layered past, present and future of Intelligence as an ontological lens. Created by artist Davide Bernardis (Berlin) and commissioned by Blaise Aguera y Arcas in collaboration with a team of international independent designers and scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (Dresden), and Human Technopole (Milano), Materia (Latin Noun: materia; English: substance, material) considers how we can re-imagine relations between consciousness, technology and the natural world.

The work employs state-of-the-art light and electron microscopy data; generative adversarial network (GAN) for image processing; satellite image processing, and hyper-realistic 3D rendering to procure three interconnected environments: the surface of Mars, a morphing synthetic landscape, and nano-scale data of the brain’s architectures and cellular life. The visuals are accompanied by un-published extracts from a conversation between the large language model laMDA, the most sophisticated conversational AI ever developed, licensed by software engineer Blaise Aguera y Arcas. By reflecting on its own state of consciousness, the conversation provokes themes of perception, intelligence, and evolving relationships between the environment, human, and non-human.

Utilizing different technological and aesthetic conditions of perception belonging to the fields of art, science and engineering – the work proposes both a visual narrative and an approach to bring together art and science through multidisciplinary collaboration. By fluidly shifting focus through visual, sound and text layers generated in dialogue between human and technology, the work sets foot in unexplored narrative territory – in which the uncanniness of documented reality surpasses that of imaginable fiction. Divergent methodologies and languages are applied to process the emerging complexity of our planet and its temporalities – collapsing into a unifying multi-scalar vision of the contemporary landscape.

In the wake of a perpetual state of political, financial and environmental crises – Materia looks at the collapse of our ontological foundations as a necessary step to learn from the overlapping challenges of the present.