Yet, It Moves!

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12.05.23

– 30.12.23

Nothing stands still. Everything moves, all the time. Even things we consider immutable are in constant motion – within, above and around us. Movement is a basic premise of everything in the universe, from the tiniest atomic particles to the human body and the macrocosm of the stars.

Featuring works by a stellar array of Danish and international artists at CC and in urban spaces across Copenhagen, Yet, It Moves! explores a fundamental constant of the universe: movement!

For the last two years, selected artists have been working with some of the world’s most prominent research institutions to develop spectacular art unfolding the theme of movement as an omnipresent phenomenon, raising our awareness of the many complex patterns of movement we are all entangled in.

The exhibiting artists are Ryoji Ikeda (b. 1966, JP), Jakob Kudsk Steensen (b. 1987, DK), Jenna Sutela (b. 1983, FI), Ligia Bouton (b. 1973, BR/US), Helene Nymann (b. 1982, DK), Nina Nowak (b. 1984, PL/DE), Jens Settergren (b. 1989, DK), Black Quantum Futurism (US), Cecilia Bengolea (b. 1979, AR), Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm (b. 1984, DK) and Nora Turato (b. 1991, HR).

They have engaged with researchers at the exhibition’s four science partners: DARK at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen; Arts at CERN in Geneva; the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University; and ModLab (Digital Humanities Laboratory) at the University of California, Davis.

This meeting of different minds has produced artworks with perspectives ranging across fields like astrophysics and quantum physics, brain and cognitive sciences, anthropology, technology and performance studies.

From the biggest halls at CC, the exhibition will extend into the cityscape, including the Inner City, Copenhagen Airport, Nørrebro, Ofelia Plads and Søndermarken – places where Copenhageners move around every day.

 

A new space of reflection where art and science meet

It is dizzying to think that all life originates from the same point in the earliest beginning of the universe, and that everything is connected by movement. Explosions of elements are constantly taking place in the universe. Giant stars blow up, forming the heavy elements and particles that we and everything around us are made of.

Yet, It Moves! looks at the greater whole of which we are a part. Available in glimpses, this greater, moving whole is embodied in spectacular artworks giving shape and form to complex phenomena like black holes, star formation and gravitational waves – from the macro scale of the expanding universe to the micro scale of atomic explosions and particle interaction. Other works focus on movement patterns of the human body – how they tie into the cyclical rhythms of the universe and how any movement is connected to everything around us.

The title of the project is a statement attributed to astronomer, physiscist and philosopher Galileo Gallilei (1564 – 1642), who was forced by the Catholic Church to deny that the Earth moves around the sun, lest it be robbed of its spot at the centre of the universe. Bravely defending his theory, Galileo declared, “And yet, it moves!”. He was referring to the now universally known fact that, no matter what humans do, the Earth still moves as part of the greater movement of the universe, affecting us and the world we move in every day. Yet, It Moves! invites CC’s visitors into the productive space where science and art meet. Both art and science are driven by a curiosity to understand the world and our place in it. Art can make abstract scientific concepts
more relatable – by giving shape and form to the vast scale of the universe and the microscopic movements of subatomic particles.

The exhibition project will stay “in motion”, with the introduction of new artworks, performances and conversations over the course of the exhibition (see program below).

 


Ryoji Ikeda, data-verse 1/2/3 (2019-20). Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. Installation view Yet, It Moves!, Copenhagen Contemporary (2023). Photo: David Stjernholm.

 

Ryoji Ikeda

data-verse 1/2/3 (2019-20)

 

Everything we know about the world and the universe we live in is based on data. We collect data and convert it into information that we use to understand the world around us, above us and within us.

Scientists convert data into machine code and representations – visual graphics or numbers – enabling scientists to use the information to investigate the order of things in the universe. Everything we see on the internet is data converted into digital form, allowing computers to read it.

The Japanese artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda employs these vast data resources in his monumental trilogy data-verse for Yet, It Moves!. In three giant video projections, he composes images and sounds from open source data sampled from scientific institutions, including CERN, NASA and the Human Genome Project.

The monumental audiovisual installation depicts three worlds of movement – in, around and above us. The microscopic natural world of atoms, molecules, DNA and cells invisible to the human eye. The human world we live in on Earth with our brains and bodies, other organisms, cities, climates, internet, air traffic, satellites. And finally, the macroscopic world – from our Earth to the solar system, galaxies, the observable universe and the potential multiverses.

Ikeda’s title alludes to the “metaverse”, a virtual reality space where users can interact with each other in networks of 3D worlds. In turn, the work also addresses the increasingly blurred lines between the digital and nondigital spaces connecting us from the planet to the cosmos.

The audiovisual style of the work is borderline psychedelic, the constant shifts in information a reminder of the vast scale of the universe and the complexity of the many kinds of movement taking place simultaneously in humans, nature and the universe.

 

About Ryoji ikeda

Ryoji Ikeda (b. 1966, Japan) is one of Japan’s most famous composers and artists. In his works, he orchestrates sound, images and physical phenomena, based on data and images from mathematics, physics and biology, into large-scale immersive installations and performances. Ikeda lives and works in Paris and Kyoto. He has exhibited and performed at numerous international museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; 180 The Strand, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2014, Ikeda won the Ars Electronica Collide@CERN Award, followed by a residency at CERN that lasted until 2015.

The data-verse trilogy is commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary.

 


Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Tongues of Verglas / Les Langues de Verglas (2023). Installation view Yet, It Moves!, Copenhagen Contemporary (2023). Photo: David Stjernholm.

 

Jakob Kudsk Steensen

Tongues of Verglas / Les Langues de Verglas (2023)

 

Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s large-scale installation for Yet, It Moves! is rooted in the artist’s interest in wetlands, time, and the state of water, from liquid to crystal.

Tongues of Verglas / Les Langues de Verglas was made after intensive fieldwork at the Arolla glacier, located at a 2,300 metre elevation in the Swiss Alps. Through digital simulation of sound and images, Kudsk Steensen explores nature from the inside, poetically revealing different dimensions of the ecosystem around the glacier.

Slowly, we are led into the body of the glacier through the tongue of ice, across the floor of volcanic glacier sand, and into the bark of the Arolla pine, into droplets of sap holding microscopic lichen from the tree. And from there, back into the ice cave in a loop. The work alternates between the almost extraterrestrial experience of the greater cosmos, as seen in the slow time of the glacier, and the microscopic life of the glacier’s ecosystem, where these tiny components of lichen within the pine tree sap are thriving at these frigid heights.

The slow tempo of the video mimics the long evolution of ice formations, while the soundtrack reproduces the “language” of the glacier: the wind, the groaning of the ice, and the trickles of water running within it. The installation is encircled by a layer of tiles made of limestone, phosphorus and glacial flour.

Like humans, nature’s elements speak different languages. From water to leaves, tree trunks, clouds and ice; all these elements exist in a continuous dialogue. The title, Tongues of Verglas / Les Langues de Verglas, refers simultaneously to the “tongue” of ice formed by water inside the mountain, the language of nature, the glacier’s location in the French-speaking part of Switzerland and the uniquely resonant space of the ice cave.

Kudsk Steensen has made two research trips to the glacier. One in winter 2022, with the writer Joel Kuennen, and another in winter 2023, with the composer and sound designer Lugh O’ Neill, to record and reconstruct the interior sound of the glacier. Between these trips, the glacier collapsed. Conversations with a local glaciologist and a mountaineer about their memories of the place, alongside the artist’s physical experience of it, help document the glacier as an entity that is no longer there.

With this work, Kudsk Steensen creates multiple temporal and spatial scales, opening a window into the countless worlds and processes that are continuously taking place beyond the limits of our physical senses.

 

About Jakob Kudsk Steensen

Jakob Kudsk Steensen (b. 1987, Denmark) is an artist working with environmental storytelling through 3D worldbuilding, spatial sound and large-scale installations. He creates poetic interpretations of overlooked natural phenomena in video, photo, audio, game and virtual reality formats. Jakob has recently exhibited at ARoS Museum of Art in Aarhus, LAS at Halle am Berghain in Berlin, Luma Arles, and at Serpentine Galleries. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards.

 


Helene Nymann, Carte De Continuonus – What do we remember that we want the future to remember? (2023). Installation view Yet, It Moves!, Copenhagen Contemporary (2023). Photo: David Stjernholm

 

Helene Nymann

Future Continuonus (2023)

 

Helene Nymann’s artistic and research practice is concerned with how language, knowledge and memory are grounded in our body and emotional life. In her current Ph.d. studies at Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, one of the research partners in Yet, It Moves!, she investigates how our daily use of digital devices and the rapid development of technology is affecting the way our memory works. Her work examines research indicating that memory is stored not only in our brains but also in our surroundings, the people and stimuli with which we interact. This has a major impact on how we process and remember information.

Nymann’s Future Continuonus consists of three parts: a video work in front of CC’s Hall 2.5, a sculptural work installed in CC’s foyer and two other locations in Copenhagen, and an interactive website.

 

Hippocampus Hippocampi & www.continuon.us

In the foyer of CC, Nymann presents one of three sculptures Hippocampus Hippocampi (2023) taking form from the part of our brain that controls not only our long-term and spatial memory but also our ability to remember and envision things.

A QR code on the sculpture provides access to the interactive website www.continuon.us, presented on a screen in the foyer and accessible with all browsers. The website is inspired by a mnemonic system, a map of emotions, devised in 1654 by the French writer Madeleine de Scudéry and her friends. Here, we are asked, “What do you remember that you want the future to remember?”

As participants, we are encouraged to provide our answers and place them on the website’s map of emotions. The answers do not represent what your memory makes you feel, but what you imagine others who read it in the future will.

We are also invited to participate in the collective memory landscape by travelling through Copenhagen and viewing two sculptures, placed by The Royal Theatre – Skuespilhuset and Niels Bohr Institute, Jagtvej 155 A. There, we are again presented with the website and questions linking memory and emotions to the place and time we are in.

 

Carte De Continuonus – What do we remember that we want the future to remember?

The video work, Carte de Continuonus – What do we Remember that we want the Future to Remember?, show various people, including the artist, in rural and urban landscapes, while a guiding voice-over underscores the emotional journey that the images invite us to take. As the video is projected onto a semi-transparent screen, we all become part of the work when we move through the room. The many layers of images and our movement around them opens up an ambiguous universe of places, spaces, memories and imaginings.

Future Continuonus is a chance to participate in a new shared space, a landscape of collective memory. The work makes us aware of how we remember things and how our experience of time is not linear, as our body, senses and consciousness link everything together in an array of moments, rhythms and memories embracing past, present and future.

 

About Helene Nymann

Artist Helene Nymann (b. 1982, Denmark) is the current artistic research fellow at Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, Denmark. Nymann is an active member of the research group Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER), an art-science collaboration led by artist Olafur Eliasson and scientist Andreas Roepstorff. Nymann has exhibited at the New Museum and the Fridman Gallery in New York, Kunsthal Aarhus and Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Denmark and MACRO, Museo D’arte Contemporanea in Rome.

 


Jenna Sutela, Pond Brain (2023) Installation view Yet, It Moves!, Copenhagen Contemporary (2023) Photo: David Stjernholm

 

Jenna Sutela

Pond Brain (2023)

 

Deep in the vast nurseries of our galaxy, ancient water resides in its atomic form. Hydrogen emerged in the Big Bang and oxygen in the cores of stars more massive than the Sun. Parallel to the earthly realm, intergalactic ponds materialize above us and beyond the stars. Looking at a pond, it seems to be saying, “as above, so below”, since it reflects the world upside down. – Jenna Sutela

Connecting us on Earth to the universe around us, this work by the Finnish artist Jenna Sutela takes inspiration from the enormous stellar explosions that have produced hydrogen and oxygen since the Big Bang. All water on Earth comes from the clouds of water vapour released when stars were born in our galaxy. A small basin of water, Pond Brain reflects the origin of water in the stars.

Pond Brain is an instrument and a fountain – a water-filled bronze bowl that can be played or activated by touch. Resembling a Chinese spouting bowl, it creates sound vibrations so powerful that droplets rise straight up from the surface of the water like a dancing fountain.

The title alludes to the work of Stafford Beer, a British scientist who drew inspiration from biology to develop unconventional computers in the 1960s. The pond is a balanced system, a living brain of sorts, adapting and transforming in response to uncertainty. Like Beer, Sutela is interested in how these systems interact with their environment – a world of brains.

We often think of brains as computers, while in fact they are more similar to instruments. Like the sound waves in the pond, the brain creates waves of its own, electromagnetic ones. Life on planet Earth would not be the same without this fascinating property allowing us to interact and adapt to our environments.

Pond Brain reflects this principle. Vibrations generated by the pond feed into an artificial intelligence, which directly transforms them into environmental and interplanetary sounds. When these external sounds return to their origin, the instrument creates something new, an alien symphony. As sound loops in the room, it constantly transforms the work, exhibiting a life cycle of its own.

 

About Jenna Sutela

Jenna Sutela (b. 1983, Finland) is a Finnish artist based in Berlin. She works with biological and computational systems, including the human microbiome and artificial neural networks to create sculptures, images and music. Sutela’s works have been presented at museums and art in contexts internationally, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2023); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2022); Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (2022); Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2022); Shanghai Biennale (2021); Liverpool Biennial (2021); Kunsthal Trondheim (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019). She was a visiting artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.

 


Ligia Bouton, excerpt from 25 Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt (2022-23). Digital lenticular print OR digital animation, variable dimensions.

 

Ligia Bouton

25 Variable Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt (2022-23)

 

For Yet, It Moves! the American artist Ligia Bouton is occupied with movement above us and has created a temporary monument to the unfairly overlooked American woman astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921).

25 Variable Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt consists of five lenticular prints and a video animation made from hundreds of photographs of hand-blown glass objects. The work features portraits of the 25 stars at the center of Leavitt’s pathbreaking research article “Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud”, published in the academic journal Harvard College Observatory in 1912.

In the article, Leavitt presented a groundbreaking discovery that gave astronomers an important new tool for mapping the stars. Her main research task was to measure and identify the locations of variable stars, based on photographic plates taken at the Harvard Observatory, Cambridge Boston and the Boyden Station in Peru. In the process, she discovered the potential of understanding the relationship between the luminosity of a Cepheid star and its pulsation period, or the duration of a star’s evolution from its smallest and faintest state to its largest and brightest one. Swan Leavitt’s discovery made it possible for other astronomers to calculate the distance between stars and their distance from earth.

Moreover, if astronomers could calculate the distance to a few of these stars, they could also calculate the distances to all the Cepheids simply by measuring their pulsation period. Leavitt’s discovery provided an important step in understanding the skies as a three-dimensional map and made it possible to solve an astrophysical mystery: the distance between cosmic bodies.

Leavitt made her way in a male-dominated field, and history has long undervalued her contributions despite their pioneering nature. Now, Bouton has created an artwork and a monument honoring the female astronomer – a work that also celebrates Leavitt’s research by using her data to precisely render the duration of the luminous explosions of the 25 stars going from faint to bright and back again. Together, the star portraits tell the story of Leavitt’s important but overlooked contribution to astronomy.

 

About Ligia Bouton

Ligia Bouton (b. 1973, Brazil) is an American artist born in São Paulo, and now based in Massachusetts and New Mexico, USA. Combining sculpture and photography with performance and video, she undertakes to recreate narratives and research from the history of science and literature and other sources. Bouton’s projects have been shown at a number of important American museums. She is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital grant and a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections.

 


Nina Nowak, MMAB, Meet Me at the Beach, Miniatures (2021/23) Installation view Yet, It Moves!, Copenhagen Contemporary (2023) Photo: David Stjernholm

 

Nina Nowak

MMAB, Meet Me at the Beach, Miniatures (2021/23)

 

The Polish-German artist Nina Nowak investigates the boundary between living and presumably inanimate matter. In various media and materials, she reflects on the body as a changeable part of this field and discusses alternative perceptions of the physical world as we see it. For Yet, It Moves!, the artist presents MMAB, Meet Me at the Beach, Miniatures, an audiovisual installation looking at the material of sandstone as a pulsating organism – a body that is constantly changing, developing new rhythms and life forms.

Nowak’s work takes us to different stages and places – sky, underground and underwater – exploring the shape of things and the transformation they undergo. One of the four videos shows an underground cave system. Deep below us, tonnes of dirt and sand for concrete are extracted and amassed to bring urban development plans to life around us – a phenomenon that is also seen in Copenhagen right now. The films are animations based on a system of mining tunnels inside a mountain in Limburg, the Netherlands, where billions-year-old limestone has been quarried for centuries to build roads, buildings and cities. The work tells the story of sand mining as a continuous movement taking place as we go about our lives in the city.

Nowak explores the structure of the mining tunnels as a negative imprint of a larger entity, making visible the whole voluminous organism of underground excavation. Over time, the void has grown, leaving an empty space in the ground below us. Looking at the tunnel system as an imprint of a larger entity, the videos speculate on where the material went and how it was changed by time and its shifting surroundings.

MMAB is an attempt to imagine mining as an enclosed ecosystem, where the material has multiple functions and uses, as it is turned into buildings, roads and cities. Nowak looks at sand as a living entity more than as a material that is moved from one place to another, cycling through a variety of life stages from solid forms to sandiness, airiness and finally water. The city, built from these materials, encapsulates space and time in something new and visible, while leaving a void somewhere else.

 

About Nina Nowak

Nina Nowak (b. 1984, Poland) lives and works in Berlin. Nowak has an MFA from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She has also studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She won the 2022 Prize for Abstract Sculpture from Diakonie Michaelshoven, Cologne, and in 2018 received a one-year working grant from Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn (the German arts foundation) and in 2021, the project grant for Meet Me at the Beach from the same institution. Nowak’s works have been exhibited at the Korean Cultural Centre,London (2022); Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2022); Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2019); and Horsens Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2018). Horsens Kunstmuseum has four of Nowak’s works in its permanent collection.

 

YET, IT MOVES AROUND COPENHAGEN

 

 


Jens Settergren, The Copenhagen Interpretation (2023) Installation view Yet, It Moves, Copenhagen Contemporary, Refshaleøen (2023) Photo: David Stjernholm

 

Jens Settergren

The Copenhagen Interpretation (2023)

17.08–30.09.2023

Location: Refshaleøen, Refshalevej 173A

 

In the 1920s, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg formulated their famous interpretation of quantum mechanics, called The Copenhagen Interpretation, and put forward the idea that every measurement affects what it measures.

For Yet, It Moves!, the Danish artist Jens Settergren has made a new multimedia installation consisting of two antenna-like sculptures that try to measure the world as it is. Based on quantum mechanics, The Copenhagen Interpretation plays with our notions of objectivity and measurability, examining what we understand as our reality.

The soundscape, composed in collaboration with composer Astrid Sonne, creates a new language for the difficult-to-describe quantum level of reality, transforming the area around the sculptures into a techno-futuristic laboratory, where field recordings, music and fragments of language entangle with the sculptures – one a large USB symbol, the other made of glass insulators from high-voltage lines.

The installation results in a strange experimental setup showing the entanglements and overlaps that take place between language and machine, subject and object, measuring device and measurement. It’s all up to interpretation!

 

About Jens Settergren

Jens Settergren (b. 1989, Denmark), a 2016 graduate of the Jutland Art Academy, has exhibited at the National Gallery of Denmark, the KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Kunsthal Aarhus, Kunstmuseum Brandts, Kunsthal Nord and the Roskilde Festival, along with a number of international venues. In recent years, Settergren has worked on public commissions, including Galaksestien (2021) in Vollsmose, Odense. His works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Denmark, KØS and the City of Copenhagen. In 2020, he received the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Talent Award.

 


Black Quantum Futurism, Instantly Local – Stretching into Infinity (2023) Installation view Yet, It Moves, Copenhagen Contemporary, Søpavillonen, Peblingesø (2023) Photo: David Stjernholm

 

Black Quantum Futurism

Instantly Local – Stretching Into Infinity (2023)

17.08–30.09.2023

Location: Søpavillonen, Peblingesøen

 

Black Quantum Futurism is the name of the artist collective of Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips. Together, they explore the intersections of futurism, creative media and activism in marginalized communities through an alternative temporal lens weaving together aspects of quantum physics and Afrodiasporic cultural traditions of time.

As part of Yet, It Moves!, Copenhagen Contemporary is showing Black Quantum Futurism’s new large neon work Instantly Local – Stretching Into Infinity at the Lake Pavilion on Peblinge Lake. Located in an area of Copenhagen known for the neon signage on buildings along Sortedam Dossering, Black Quantum Futurism’s glowing words are a reminder that time, at the moment of perception, is local, now and here, while its significance potentially stretches into infinity, impacting history in the long run.

Subverting the hierarchical, linear understanding of time, Instantly Local – Stretching Into Infinity illuminates multiple perspectives of time, highlighting it as a cultural construct. Time is local, depending on where and when it is experienced – a subjective experience that varies from person to person, culture to culture and from region to region.

 

About Black Quantum Futurism

Through interdisciplinary writing, music, film, art and creative research projects, the USA based artist collective Black Quantum Futurism focuses on marginalized Black American communities’ cultural practices.Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips won the 2020 Collide Award for their project CPT Symmetry and Violations. Expanding their artistic research at CERN from September to October 2022, they investigated how basic physics can influence the way people think about, experience and measure time in their everyday reality.

 


Cecilia Bengolea, Neutrino Ensemble (2023) Installation view Yet, It Moves, Copenhagen Contemporary, BLOX Havnepassagen (2023) Photo: David Stjernholm

 

Cecilia Bengolea

Neutrino Ensemble (2023)

17.08–22.10.2023

Location: BLOX Havnepassagen

 

Neutrino Ensemble is a new film by the Argentinean artist Cecilia Bengolea commissioned by Copenhagen Contemporary for Yet, It Moves! The film takes us on a journey to the world of neutrinos, the smallest and most abundant particles in the universe. Bengolea creates a spectacular visual interpretation of the movement of the particles as if they were dancers in an ensemble.

Transforming cosmology and astrophysics into a dance, Bengolea connects performance and scientific disciplines as a method to study anthropology, musicology and cosmology.

The choreography features the acclaimed performer Michelle Lámy dancing and moving on an experimental fountain designed by astrophysicist Thierry Foglizzo, simulating movements of attraction between massive stars colliding and producing the particles that humans, and all things, are made of.

The film is made in collaboration with astrophysicists at the DARK research centre at Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, and with Thierry Foglizzo at CEA-Saclay.

 

About Cecilia Bengolea

Cecilia Bengolea (b. 1979, Argentina) works in a variety of media, including performance, video and sculpture. From her anthropological research into contemporary and archaic dance forms from around the world, she picks up techniques, movements and choreographies to shape her artistic vocabulary. Her performances has been presented at the Coachella Festival, Art Basel and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao among others. Her work can be found in major public collections, including TBA21 Academy, MIRE – Fond cantonal d’art contemporain, The Vinyl Factory, Le CNAP, Le Consortium, Fiorucci Art Trust, Tank Shanghai, Fundación Arco, Museo Reina Sofia, Kadist France, Mudam Luxembourg and the MONA – Museum of Old and New Art of Tasmania.

 


Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm & ARTificial Mind, MADE OF STARDUST (2023) Installation view Yet, It Moves, Copenhagen Contemporary, Sifs Plads (2023) Photo: David Stjernholm

 

Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm & ARTificial Mind

MADE OF STARDUST (2023)

17.08–16.10.2023

Location: Sifs Plads

 

MADE OF STARDUST is an interactive audiovisual installation made especially for Yet, It Moves! The installation consists of a 35 square metre LED screen, soundscape and machine learning generating movies based on audience interaction and data sourced from scientific repositories, including NASA’s IPAC archive and the James Webb and Hubble telescopes.

Waagner Falkenstrøm’s installation investigates the cosmic, yet microscopic world around us. Stardust connect us to remote galaxies and to all things here on Earth. All elements in our bodies – iron, zinc, calcium – come from dust created by the explosions of stars, more than 4.5 billion years ago. Even today, stardust continues to reach us. Every minute, tiny particles of micrometeorites, less than a millimetre in size, rain on Earth from outer space and carry remains of the earlier universe in the form of stardust from pre-solar times. While these particles are invisible to the human eye, they remind us of the presence of the universe on Earth and that we, humans, are made of stardust.

MADE OF STARDUST connects the viewer directly with their space heritage by transforming their face into an avatar made of thousands of tiny, shining stardust particles.

MADE OF STARDUST is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and realized in close collaboration with researcher Arka Sarangi of the DARK research centre at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. The installation of the artwork on Sifs Plads is made possible in partnership with the City of Copenhagen’s neighbourhood renewal program Områdefornyelsen ved Skjolds Plads, University College Copenhagen (KP) and the local community.

 

About Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm

Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm (b. 1984, Denmark) is an artist and founder of art-tech studio ARTificial Mind working with generative artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies to create artworks that investigate our human relationship to technology and outer space. Cecilie’s work has been awarded several prestigious awards, including winning the global award for digital art The Lumen Prize twice. Falkenstrøm has exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Ars Electronica, Austria and aboard NASA’s part of the International Space Station. MADE OF STARDUST was created by Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm and her art-tech studio ARTificial Mind consisting of assistant artist, Cody Lukas, and software engineers, Jens Hegner Stærmose, Asbjørn Olling and Alexander Krog.

 

Research partners

DARK, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen
The Dark Research Section studies the nature of dark matter and dark energy. In addition, the centre is involved in astrophysics teaching at the university.

Arts at CERN, Geneva
Arts at CERN was established to promote dialogue between art and physics. Artists across creative disciplines are invited to CERN to get a close look at how science studies the big questions of the universe, inspiring exchanges between art and physics in an international cultural community.

Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University
The Interacting Minds Centre (IMC) is an interdisciplinary research centre for the study of human interaction. The centre includes researchers from the humanities, social sciences, the cognitive sciences, biology and clinical research. IMC focuses on three subjects related to human interaction: cognition, communication and choice.

ModLab (Digital Humanities Laboratory), University of California, Davis
UC Davis ModLab is an experimental laboratory for the study of new media and technology, and digital humanities. The lab is a dynamic experimental environment for research into games, improvisation, virtual reality and experimental projects in science and art.

 

Program

Artists at CC (May-December)
Ryoji Ikeda, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Helene Nymann, Jenna Sutela, Ligia Bouton and Nina Nowak

Bloom Festival (26-28 May)
Opening of Jens Settergren’s work in Søndermarken

Copenhagen Airport (26 June – 9 July)
CC presents works by exhibiting artists on all screens in the arrivals terminal at Copenhagen Airport.

Artists in the city (August–October)

Helene Nymann
17 August – 30 September 2023
Location: Skuespilhuset & Niels Bohr Institute

Jens Settergren
17 August – 30 September 2023
Location: Refshaleøen, Refshalevej 173A

Black Quantum Futurism
17 August – 30 September 2023
Location: Søpavillonen, Peblingesøen

Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm
17 August – 16 October 2023
Location: Sifs Plads

Cecilia Bengolea
17 August – 22 October 2023
Location: BLOX, Havnepassagen