METATOPIA           IMF 2018          Jaime del Val

Metasculptures – Installations

Metasculptures are flexinamic (flexible and dynamic) structures that attach to buildings and bodies, indoors or outdoors, suspended or attached to walls or on the ground, creating amorphous connections between bodies and buildings, as amorphous (meta)organs –interstices– for a (meta)body that transforms individual and collective perception by generating a sensation of coemergence and inseparability from space, an anticartesian space that emerges with  movement and is never finalised.

Metasculptures have peculiar kinetic properties reacting physically to the movement of the environment or the connected bodies and they can also have embedded micromotors that give them autonomous movement while interacting with bodies and environment through sensors, exhibiting varieties of undefined behaviours, like an indeterminate life form in-between the scale of bodies and architectures as architectural and bodily mutation.

Metasculptures can be presented as purely physical suspended sculptures in daylight, indoors or outdoors, inviting the audience to inhabit them as they infiltrate spaces and invite uncommon perceptions and behaviours.

Metasculptures can be perfomed by a dancer or perfomer who moves with them in the gallery space.

Metasculptures can become a more complex environment with projections of interactive digital architectures and spatialised sound in the dark, indoors or outdoors, as participatory installation for the audience and as performative environment where a performer wearing sensors on the body interacts with the metasculpture. The audience can also interact through sensors. The projections on the sculptures are digital architectures that breathe, like metaorgans of an amorphous body modulated with sensors on the body of a performer or of the audience; or skin from the performer or participants projected in real time through cameras on the body, a body without anatomy.

Metasculptures can include robotics (or, rather metabotics: non mechanical and non anthropomorphic robotics, machine un-learning and anti-AI: Untrainment machines for the development of BI: Body Intelligence), with embedded micromotors and sensors, for the autonomous movement of the structures which become a semi-autonomous living organism infiltrating buildings in varied compositions.

Metasculptures are often generated in processes of co-creation with particular communities in particular places as body-specific and sites-pecific projects embodying concepts, local materials and experiences that develop during the process. See for instance the expreince in the Pikpa Refugee Camp in Lesvos in 2017.