Antony Gormley
Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan
Lunatick
About the Item
The first joint project by sculptor Antony Gormley and astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, produced by curator of the 53rd Venice Biennale Daniel Birnbaum and the company Acute Art.
Antony Gormley and Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan uses data collected by NASA to map a real and interactive journey, leaving Earth to pass through the atmosphere, stratosphere, the asteroid belt, and into outer space. This immersive experience treats the body as a vessel, free from gravity, in order to bring the haptic experience of space alive.
Wearing an immersive headset, viewers begin their journey on the deserted island of Kiritimati (Christmas Island) in the Pacific Ocean - an island which, due to rising sea levels, is in danger of disappearing. After discovering a launch pad in amongst a cluster of palm trees, the user’s body falls upwards through the clouds and into outer space.
The user will then explore the intricate landscape of the cosmos by circumnavigating the globe and catching a glimpse of the Northern Lights, before being arriving on the Moon. Users are invited to explore its vast surface and gravitational force, as only twelve men previously have done.
From the Moon, the viewer is thrown further into space, past the shimmering surface of the Milky Way, towards the heart of the solar system - the Sun - where they are eventually met by a blinding white light, marking the end of the piece.
To produce the artwork, Acute Art used multiscale modelling to recreate tiny elements such as flowers and the colossal objects of the Earth, Moon and the Sun. One of the most significant challenges was to create an optic sensation of the real size of an object, within the infinite scale of the cosmos.
By exploring the cosmic realities at the heart of Dr Natarajan’s research, Gormley was able to take his lifelong investigation of the-body-in-space into another dimension. On VR, Gormley explains, ‘[it] is the latest tool to extend our consciousness imaginatively beyond the limits of our bounding condition and realise our cosmic identity.’
On the project, Dr Natarajan states, 'I have always wanted to share the magic and majesty of the universe in a more intimate experiential way and this project Lunatick with Antony Gormley and Acute Art provided an exciting opportunity for just such a unique voyage of exploration.'
Produced by Acute Art
About the Artist
Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.
Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at venues including Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Germany (2021); The Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019), Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2019); the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2019); Long Museum, Shanghai (2017); Forte di Belvedere, Florence (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1989). Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia), Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands) and Chord (MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA).
Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan is a professor in the departments of astronomy and physics at Yale University. She is noted for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy, particularly with her work in gravitational lensing, and in models describing the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes.
Other Works
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