“Entropy Wrangler,” Ian Cheng’s 2013 exhibition at Off Vendome in Dusseldorf, was an excellent introduction to the logic behind this artist’s practice. The centerpiece was a large projection in the gallery’s basement described as “a live computer simulation that changes and evolves, forever.” Like all of Cheng’s simulations, it was programmed with motion capture techniques that register the physical movements of performers that are then translated onto digital bodies. These bodies coexist as individual entities subject to the laws and dynamics of a causal, virtual world: avatars of people and common objects, like hammers and basketball players, rendered in basic three-dimensional form and caught in the zero gravity of the digital screen

Telemetron
Nicole L’Huillier and Sands Fish decided to explore how design and creativity might evolve as we begin to do more than merely survive in space. The Telemetron is a unique musical instrument that takes advantage of the poetics of zero gravity, and opens a new field of musical creativity. The project attempts to expand expression beyond the limits of Earth-based instruments and performers. Leveraging sensors, data transmission and capture (for performance after flight), as well as their experience as composers and performers, Sands and Nicole explore a new body language for music.

Cloud Core Scanner

Her current installation IN THE TROPOSPHERE LAB provides insights into the material produced under conditions distant from earth. The exhibition tells of the formation of clouds and shows conditions and combinations of art and science during zero gravity. With the exhibition by Agnes Meyer-Brandis, the project space of the Ernst Schering Foundation once again presents a contemporary art project that stimulates interdisciplinary debate and builds bridges to scientific research. The lab as a gravimetric document of the “Cloud Core Scanner” experiment shows a world alternating between controlled and bound-less states – artistic research in search of the reality level of constructions of the matter that surrounds us.