NEBULA

Category: Art Installation
Location: Wuhan, China
Size: 3 m (W) × 8 m (L) × 12 m (H)
Material: Glass, cable, stainless steel, custom electronics
Year: 2024

A reverie in search of the sublime
Infinite/ intimate/ immensity

MZLY 30.57844779°, 114.28160846°

Echoes of the past cast long shadows into the future whereupon light reverberates light back in on itself.

A building whose memory is engrained in the very walls, a deep patina of stories of which we know not. A narrative that leaves us wondering. An unanswered melancholy whose glimpse of the future is presented as a continuum of the new and as yet untold stories, this is a work about potential. About preservation of the past yet celebration of the future.

The 3-storey rotunda in which the artwork is sited, allows us to create a portal from the past connecting into the future. Ecclesiastical in character the 13m high cylindrical space has moments of magic as afternoon sun filters through arched windows, crepuscular rays of sunlight that remind us of a greater power. It is a space that elicits awe and opens an aperture to allow the sublime through.

NEBULA is a work that reaches out to connect to that greater power, connecting the nostalgic patina of the past, a compelling beauty of decay that’s cast against a glistening shock of the new. It is in this dichotomy of old and new we seek to exploit.

In essence, NEBULA is a celebration of rebirth, its form a cyclical continuum, an infinitum. It is in this form and representation that NEBULA celebrates the future narrative yet to play out.

Our atomised compartmentalised modernity: multitasked lives dominated by efficacy and fractured like 5-second video clips, all staccato, all noise and no signal. Digital lives envelope dominate and dictate, it is in this fragmentation that our soul yearns for a clear path through.

Nebula is carefully structured, a call to action commences the show, glitches and sounds of opening pervade - dimensional white noise enhances the spatial orientation whilst low bass drives highlight the spatial immensity. Punctuated by structured bass and droning sounds, and low tones that ground the soul, primal beats at 120 beats per minute resonate at the natural frequency of the human movement. Light reaches out in searching, from outside searching inward. Sirens pierce as light scans past from outside to inside, searching out of ourselves, before transforming into a search within. From positive to negative space. Chronology is destroyed, as the past merges with the present and future concurrently.

Our inspiration is elicited through the science fiction genre, of an oxymoronic futuristic nostalgia.

The Sound and light experience commences at sunset each day according to the precise coordinates and sunset definitions.