In the fall of 2022, the Primordial project, a show on the basement floor of London’s 180 The Strand Gallery, became a notable installation. Projected onto the concrete, a flickering rainbow of neon organisms rippled softly, responding to the vibrations of the atmospheric sounds transmitted through the speakers.
This mock aquarium was part of Lifeforms by Universal Everything, an exhibition that brought together 15 years of art and three new installations created using software from the international design team Universal Everything. Their case uses new technologies such as motion capture and generative graphics.
Lifeforms is a utopian project that envisions an alternate future filled with curious and playful digital creatures instead of artificial intelligence. The idea was to imagine an underground ecosystem built on complex mathematical equations. A parade of “unique personalities born from code” projected onto a screen.
“How trees grow, how cells interact with each other – all the building blocks of life can be reduced to formulas,” explains the development team. Code is like a seed that then sprouts into software. “We don’t know the outcome. It often produces things that are more beautiful, strange, ugly, or amazing than we ever imagined.”
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