If you have ever looked at a sheet of bubble wrap and kind of wanted to climb inside, or been jealous of spiders that can amble over soap bubbles like physics ain’t no thing, Argentinean artist Tomás Saraceno’s latest installation has enough acreage of inflated PVC to do the job. “On Space and Time Foam,” on view underfoot at Milan’s HangarBicocca through February 3, 2013, is a three-story climbable plastic cloud made from translucent PVC membranes and suspended 24 meters above the floor. The work is an extension of Saraceno’s “Cloud Cities” at the Hamburger Banhof last year and a precursor to an amazing-sounding solar-powered floating biosphere suspended above the Maldives. Read more!

Picking up where “Cloud Cities” left off, Saraceno delves further into the idea of atmosphere with “On Space and Time Foam.” Each level of the structure has its own climate, turning the daily reality of air pressure into an interactive experience. As visitor-cloudhikers make their way up and down the bubble, their movements change the atmospheric environments of everyone else inside. As fanciful as a foamy crawlstructure sounds, the experience Saraceno creates is ultimately a social one—it’s plastic clouds, yes, but it’s also a distilled version of a city. In a video recorded with designboom, the artist emphasized the idea of shared responsibility. “Every action that you do is somehow implicated in the way that others also are going to experience it,” he said. “We are so codependent.”

As usual with Saraceno’s work, references abound, from utopian architecture and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes to games of scale and even quantum mechanics. “Space and Time Foam” refers to spacetime foam, or quantum foam—tiny eruptions of turbulence in the curve of spacetime that give the fabric of the universe a foamy texture.

Can’t get to Milan in time to do a faceplant in some quantum foam? Saraceno is up to his space-bending tricks Stateside, too. If you’re in the Boston area, check out his upcoming panel at MIT (where he’s a visiting artist), Moving Beyond Materiality, next Thursday, November 15, at 6:30 p.m.

All photos © Alessandro Coco

by Lamar Anderson

posted in exhibitions

tagged exhibitions, installations, Milan, Tomas Saraceno, utopia

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