Anywhen is an immersive artwork by French avant-garde artist Philippe Parreno. Billed as an exhibition that challenges your perception of time and space, it’s essentially, as The New Scientist puts it, a “factory-sized [children’s] mobile.” It features an ever-changing mix of sound, light and shadow, augmented by fish-shaped balloons, a transforming array of suspended speakers and a cinema that seemingly appears at random.
Except, it’s not random. The individual elements of Anywhen are at the whim of bacteria. Bioreactors sit in the corner of the Turbine Hall, housing a colony of yeast cultures. Data on the colony’s movements, temperature and growth is being collected by scientists from University College London, and is fed into an algorithm that controls the artwork’s many elements. As the cultures mature over the course of the exhibition, they’ll forever change the patterns that play out.
via Engadget
