Our first physical artwork at the British Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery
On Thursday, we will unveil the first-ever physical artwork by Untold Garden. It will be on display at the British Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, from the 26th to the 29th of September.
The work, titled "Reach", combines hand clay sculpting, traditional bronze casting, electronics and spatial computing, traditional crafts merged with the most recent technologies, together forming a collective experience based on our most intimate byproduct: body heat.
After years of immersing ourselves in virtual worlds, we felt inspired to explore if we could bring the interactivity and experientiality at the core of our practice into a physical piece. Something simultaneously tactile and participatory, physical and interspatial, static and active.
Bronze is a material both ancient and commonplace, standard for sculptures, often as some bust of a long-dead person collecting dust in a niche or bird poop in the corner of a park. Can a sculpture like this be interactive?
Our work is always a reflection on how technology shapes human relations. Regardless of medium, our work retains a communicative aspect, in the sense that it allows you, the audience, to communicate with or through it, not in a metaphorical way, but in a you-can-actually-say-sing-dance-something way. In that sense, they are less like objects and more like mediums. Can a static sculpture be a medium?
The fundamental difference between an object like a sculpture and an object like a film, a video game or a song is that it is tangible; you can feel its surface, its cold or warmth, its smooth or roughness. To differentiate itself from those other mediums, the mediality of a sculpture needs to utilise this sense, tragically overlooked in contemporary art and society in general: Touch.
Time is the internal form of space; just as space is the external form of time.
—Novalis
We started the concept process by reading the physicist Carlo Rovelli’s book “The Order of Time.” In it, he explains, in accessible terms, contemporary quantum physics view of time as a property as contextual and malleable as space. He states, "in the elementary equations of the world, the arrow of time appears only where there is heat. The link between time and heat is therefore fundamental: every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved.” It then follows that just as time is the internal form of space, heat is the internal form of time.
This conception of time as heat became a starting point for the piece. The communicative aspects of heat are obvious; Touch is heat. Touch is communication. In her short story 'The Author of the Acacia Seeds,' Ursula K. Le Guin meditates on the communication systems of other species; of the Empire Penguin, huddled together deep in the Antarctic night, she speculates a language based entirely on touch:
[they] cannot hear each other; they cannot see each other. They can only feel the other's warmth. That is their poetry, that is their art. Like all kinetic literatures, it is silent; unlike other kinetic literatures, it is all but immobile, ineffably subtle. The ruffling of a feather; the shifting of a wing; the touch, the faint, warm touch of the one beside you.
It’s a great text. We highly recommend it.
In Reach, your touch is expanded into a virtual tactile language, a somatic poetry of sorts. The interspatiality of the individual sculptures allows them to maintain their connection across vast distances, connecting your touch to the touch of others regardless of where in the world you are.
The heat flow that this interconnectedness enables can be viewed through an augmented reality layer on Meadow for Apple Vision Pro (we'll return to Meadow, our social XR platform, in a near future newsletter.) This turns Reach into an intimate social network accessible only to those who can touch its physical manifestation, communicating solely through the medium of their own body heat.
Reach is exhibited as a part of PIVOTAL: Digitalism, the British Art Fair's new section for digital art. We are honoured to be a part of it, and extend heartfelt thanks to Rebekah Tolley, Lol Sargeant, and the rest of the curatorial team.
A big thanks to the tireless crew at Rosengren & Nilsson Metalgjuteri (seen in the video above pouring molten bronze into one of our moulds), Jared Bellingham for his engineering prowess, Albin Karlsson for Houdini wizardry, and Marcel Mueller for sound virtuosity.
Get in touch if you are interested in viewing the exhibition.
We hope to see you there,
Untold Garden 🌱
