Site: Compton Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 

City/State: Cambridge, MA

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Country: U.S.A

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Year: 2017

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The exhibition Making Waves was designed and built in 2017 to celebrate the MIT professor of Physics Rainer Weiss nominated (and then winner) to the Nobel Prize for his project LIGO, a sophisticated system for detecting gravitational waves released after the creation of a black hole. The challenge of this project was its narratives. How to combine the personal narrative of  Weiss and his research with a spatial narrative that was able to embed visible and tangible information about our contemporary conception of universe.

In a quite difficult space of 30ft long for 6 ft as maximum width I decided to overlap the two narratives, creating a sort of theatre set (the gallery space itself) where the main graphic story of Weiss was unfolding. So the gallery spaces becomes the locus of an underlying spatial narrative that visitor can access. On the floor a printed anamorphosis of a space-time grid distortion which deceived visitors approaching to the gallery frontally (from the main corridor) (48) where the graphic narrative begins while visitors approach. But the anamorphosis revealed itself as soon as visitors entered in the space. The fiberglass rods wave suspended from the ceiling was not immobile but each of its rods moved as touch by the visitor. The spatial narrative created in the gallery talked about instability, incongruence between perceived universe and calculable one. It invited visitor to go behind the scene of what they see, accept the deceptiveness of our vision and crawl under the unstable curve of a universe that we cannot control.

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Team: Seth Riskin, Sienna Scarf  (Graphic Designer)