Commissioned by 180 Studios, Lifeforms is a collection of generative video, interactive installations and sculptures inhabiting the vast spaces at 180 The Strand, London
âAmongst the Lifeforms show at 180 Studios, London, a dancer duets with a robot that imitates his movements while simultaneously morphing into other robots. Multicoloured creatures, lifesize and covered in glowing fibres, flit along a revolving catwalk. A vast creature, something like a yeti, strides forwards into the future while transforming into balloons, clouds and architectural structures before your enchanted eyes. This ever-changing figure harks back to Umberto Boccioniâs futurist sculpture of a walking man, and everything here reprises art (or life) with such mesmerising ingenuity that itâs like being in at the dawn of a new kind of magic lantern. There is even one screen where your own sweeping arm movements can call up a rainforest right there on screen: humanityâs disaster reversed by humanity, like some miraculous dream â â â â â â â
The freestanding screen structures were designed in collaboration with Ab Rogers Design
Drawings by Universal Everything
Drawings by Ab Rogers Design
Lifeforms logo designed by Universal Everything
Constantly unique, Lifeforms is an amalgam of installations that mirror and shift with time and the publicâs interactions. No visitor will see the same show twice.
This exhibition brings together 14 of our digital âlifeformsâ, existing in individual habitats created by Ab Rogers Design. Our biggest UK solo show to date fuses architecture, projection, generative video, sound and interaction to spawn vibrant ever-evolving characters. Looping video experiences create curiously mesmerising parades of future humans, micro-organisms and plants â a subterranean world of hyperreal lifeforms.
Premiering three new works â Primordial, Maison Autonome, and Into the Sun â Lifeforms embraces and subverts the power of emerging technologies, from high-end visual effects and real-time game engines to physics simulations and computer vision. Through stylised body movements, diverse appearances and mass behaviours, digital soulful life emerges.
The artworks draw from the history of visual culture â from the Futuristsâ attempt to depict the body in motion to Eadweard Muybridgeâs sequential 19th-century film experiences.
We created many of the lifeforms in this exhibition with generative software. We design the computational systems that grow characters, plants or abstract lifeforms â yet personalities emerge by themselves.
Lifeforms is at 180 The Strand, London, 10 Octoberâ18 December 2022. Open WednesdayâSunday, 11amâ7pm.
We have calculated the display of artworks will use 7500kWh of electricity, resulting in 2 tonnes of CO2 emissions (2tCO2e). This is the equivalent of air freighting four large paintings from London to LA. We have carbon offset these emissions with Solar Aid.
Artworks :
Primordial (World Premiere)
Infinity (UK Premiere)
Walking City
Future You
Machine Learning
Maison Autonome (World Premiere)
Supreme Believers
Superconsumers (UK Premiere)
Transfiguration (2020)
Live Forever (World Premiere)
Into the Sun (World Premiere)
Voxel Posse
Nature Always Wins (UK Premiere)
Communion (2020)