‘There isn’t really an English word for what we have created. It's kind of an experience; a performance; a living artwork.’ So says Random International’s dramaturg Heloise Reynolds, of the practice’s latest installation, unveiled in London last week.
Staged in the echoing Roundhouse theatre, the art-meets-technology studio has designed seven helium-filled white globes that hover and swarm around the space on tiny propellers. In one moment, they’re pack-like, curious. In others, they’re inanimate, programmed, droning. ‘We’re trying to create a sense of otherness,’ says Random International co-founder Hannes Koch. ‘We want people to feel like aliens. We want to say, “This is how it feels to be intimately exposed to a very advanced organism.”’
Dreamt up in an unlikely industrial estate in Balham, where Random International’s engineers have spent the last five months buried under complex behavioural data maps, the spheres’ flocking behaviour is determined by generative algorithms built to resemble human characteristics. Able to react to their environment, the computer-controlled orbs select individuals from the audience to hone in on – swooping inquisitively towards them, or sinisterly mirroring their movements. In a landscape of driverless cars, digital butlers and ‘the robots are coming!’, these oddly familiar spheres pull at the tangled thread of what it means to be human in the age of AI.
Frequent Random International collaborator, choreographer Wayne McGregor, has long been fascinated by this ever-slimming intersection between man and machine. Through his futuristic staging and his boundary-defying collaborations, McGregor does more than walk the ‘uncanny valley’, he dances there.
As he has done here, engaging a troop of his dynamic studio dancers to perform underneath the hovering, human-like globes to an electronic score especially composed by Warp Records’ Mark Pritchard. The formidable likes of Edward Watson and Fukiko Takase look anonymous, painted with either a ‘+’ or ‘–’ symbol. They are human magnets, pulling together and pushing apart. The elemental dancers enter into a loose dialogue with the globes, staying low, as the orbs twist into lofty formations overhead.
The human and technological aspects of the exhibition interact seamlessly, a testament to the well-matched collaborators – despite the fact McGregor didn't know exactly how the installation would look and act until it was installed. ‘I got it conceptually, and that was enough,’ he explains.
It helps that the collaborators are ‘on the same page aesthetically’. Instead of shunning technology as a clinical device, both McGregor and Random International use it as a theatrical tool to evoke emotion. ‘I think technology can make you feel something,’ McGregor continues. ‘It’s visceral. It can help the audience to embody a performance.’
That’s exactly what the spheres do here. As the dancers file out, the stage is left empty for audience members to enter into their own duet with the white globes, in what Koch describes as an ‘emotive experiment’. Forgetting our inhibitions, we enter into a game of computerised cloud-gazing, in a display of how the human imagination, and the artificial one, can partner to create something out of this world.
The spheres are programmed using complex algorithms and motion sensors to react intelligently to their surroundings and to bodies in their environment.
Visitors will be surrounded by a mysterious flock of flying spheres in a hypnotic experience created in response to the Roundhouse’s unique architecture.
On Friday and Saturday evenings, the installation will host an immersive new dance work created by Wayne McGregor and featuring Company Wayne McGregor performing with dancers from The Royal Ballet.
INFORMATION
Wayne McGregor’s ‘+/– Human’ performances run until 28 August, and ‘Zoological’ is on view until 31 August. For more information, visit the Roundhouse website, the Random International website and Wayne McGregor’s website
ADDRESS
Roundhouse
Chalk Farm Road
London NW1 8EH
-
Year in review: top 10 design stories of 2024Wallpaper* magazine's 10 most-read design stories of 2024 whisk us from fun Ikea pieces to the man who designed the Paris Olympics, and 50 years of the Rubik's Cube
-
Sharon Smith's Polaroids capture 1980s New York nightlifeIDEA Books has launched a new monograph of Smith’s photographs, titled Camera Girl and edited by former editor-in-chief of LIFE magazine, Bill Shapiro
-
A multifaceted Beverly Hills house puts the beauty of potentiality in the frameA Beverly Hills house in Trousdale, designed by Robin Donaldson, brings big ideas to the residential scale
-
Inside the distorted world of artist George RouyFrequently drawing comparisons with Francis Bacon, painter George Rouy is gaining peer points for his use of classic techniques to distort the human form
-
‘I'm endlessly fascinated by the nude’: Somaya Critchlow’s intimate and confident drawings are on show in London‘Triple Threat’ at Maximillian William gallery in London is British artist Somaya Critchlow’s first show dedicated solely to drawing
-
Surrealism as feminist resistance: artists against fascism in Leeds‘The Traumatic Surreal’ at the Henry Moore Institute, unpacks the generational trauma left by Nazism for postwar women
-
Looking forward to Tate Modern’s 25th anniversary partyFrom 9-12 May 2025, Tate Modern, one of London’s most adored art museums, will celebrate its 25th anniversary with a lively weekend of festivities
-
Out of office: what the Wallpaper* editors have been doing this weekA week in the world of Wallpaper*. Here's how our editors have been entertaining themselves in the run up to Christmas
-
Love, melancholy and domesticity: Anna Calleja is a painter to watchAnna Calleja explores everyday themes in her exhibition, ‘One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night’, at Sim Smith, London
-
Ndayé Kouagou speaks the language of the chaotic social media influencer in LondonNdayé Kouagou celebrates meandering incoherence with an exhibition, ‘A Message for Everybody’, at Gathering in London
-
Out of office: what the Wallpaper* editors have been doing this weekA snowy Swiss Alpine sleepover, a design book fest in Milan, and a night with Steve Coogan in London – our editors' out-of-hours adventures this week
