Information Skies

Overview

Founded a decade ago, Metahaven is a research-driven design studio, whose work spans the fields of art, design, filmmaking, teaching, publishing. Although the studio is committed to developing concepts that forge new theoretical terrain, Metahaven is just as interested in their tangible realisation.

For SB13, Metahaven presents the immersive film installation Information Skies (2016), which draws parallels between digital and natural world experience. Fusing three genres of moving image—live action, animation and digital overlay—the work follows two protagonists who embark on an expedition in and out of virtual reality. At stake are not only explorations of human perception—questions of what is real or how reality is defined—but also the experience of traversing new conceptions of territory on the horizon. We hear the female protagonist speak in Hungarian about digging in a ‘steppe of pixels’. In the age of interactive and user-generated content in addition to the rapid construction of IT warehouses across the globe, ‘clouds’ may not be some distant repository of data and processing power but rather a planetary-scale frontier with which we are already engaging.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 13.