‘Let’s say that almost everything is true’ - Paolo Sorrentino
In the midst of evergreen noise, a microcosm unfolds. Vast, expansive, and public, it reveals itself, bathed in sunlight, performing and playing amongst the synchronicity of things. It is not confined solely to the closed, systemic worlds of the metaverse. This spectacle is a celebration of the world, existing within and never without it, Here, we see a collection of atmospheres, a stage where fantastic characters emerge. Myriad acts - pantomimes, machines, aliens, animals, and acrobats - spill out from the wings, each bringing their unique flavour to the circle: rotations, revolutions, spirals.
The electric tent vibrates with the energy of a thousand and one stories. Thin scaffolds impossibly balance the monumental construction, and scenes shift at the speed of light. The audience and the performers are both active and affectionate. The Big top, a demountable approximation, shelters them all: digital cogs and gears, mechanical coils and weights. It is located, without being local; it has humour yet it transcends pure amusement; it is firm without having a foundation; it is coherent without being fixed; it has a legacy, but no roots; It thrives in paradoxes.
In its unabashed fakeness, the circus constitutes new truths. Through rampant illusions, it composes the real. Its origins are shrouded in mystery, but its travels appear in folklore everywhere, whispered throughout time. Like a peep box or raree show; a moveable feast for the nomads and settlers alike.
1. As the Stage Unfolds, the Screens Come to Life
The Paper-thin screens burst into life. Much like a Diorama, the sunlight both falls on and through the crystalline, linen fabric. Always vibrant, always lit in the weathers of the planet, always probabilistic.
A tapestry of endless potentiality; anything, anywhere, all at once. At one moment scenes from London being played in Paris or vice versa. The fake observatory colours each moment with a new scene, every inch imbued with character. Genres of imagery: photo-realistic to anime, Nintendo to Xbox, Murakami to Cezanne, all exist in the same fertile plane of the internet, each as easily mimicked as the other. Mosaics of pixels, stained glass, and painted icons realise the space in a theatrical manner. Architectural games of the inside and the outside, the part and the whole, the figure and the ground are perpetually played. Here in this space the structure is hard to discern: the physical and the digital, the machinic and the analogue, switch places, continuously re-negotiating their connections.
Corinthian columns appear in the Barcelona pavilion by Mies, while the gods from the Pantheon travel to the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Materials also transcend their physicality: plastics with a metallic sheen, concrete that glows, wood that sparkles. Compositions take shape, connections are forged, architectures emerge; encircled in the circus. An infrastructure in service of the fantastic; fully magical, fully mechanical, fully electric.
Amidst the smoke and mirrors, you willingly suspend disbelief.
1750 - 1753 - Giambattista Tiepolo paints the largest ceiling fresco in the world in the vault of the baroque staircase at the Würzburg Residence. It is titled: “Apollo and the Four Continents” and spans an area of 18 X 32 m with a maximum height of 23 m.
2. As the Spectacle Unfolds, the Center Goes Dark
Energy surrounds the abyss, erupting in a halo of light. It is impossible to see it with your naked eye. In this space, the void acquires a tangible presence rather than an absence. There is only energy, becoming the site to project our colours into. The retinal subsides, the situational enters the circle.
We learn to see again, like a blind man with a cane. Synthetic augmentations, complex mechanics, magic lanterns, telescopes, microscopes, Dalle-e, Midjourney. The infrared, the electromagnetic, and the imaginal suddenly appear: partly simulated, partly generated, partly sensed. The act of seeing acquires an artificiality, and vicariously we see a new light. Light here is more than a passive illuminator. It is a light that counts time. It is a light that measures distances. It is a light that synchronises.
A million distinct, divergent yet interconnected images are brought together as one by the void. Reflections, Refractions, Diffractions. Physics, computer graphics, politics, all play their part in a new scale of visibility. We become voyeurs and voyagers at the same time. Light years collapsed in an instance, the allegory of the universe compressed in a single document, symbolising all we can see in one whole of the unseen and the unseeable.
This is no space for reality, only the probable and the plausible
2019 - The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captures the first image of the Supermassive Black Hole (M87) using 1.3 mm microwaves in the Messier 87 supergiant elliptical galaxy. The image provides a test for Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
3. As the Court Unfolds, Time Stands Still
A fantastical clock chimes loudly; dragons breathe fire, peacocks chirp, and metallic balls drop in the symphony of this mechanical wonder. This is not just a chronometer, it is a device for communication across cultures. Durations in multiples, each discrete, characteristic, and timely in its own way. Signals, charges, chimes. legacies, histories, plants, animals, stones, and mountains, in sync with the cosmic clock.
That which is inanimate comes to life; singing automatons, robotic knights, and chatbots all. These are not merely machines enslaved by a puppeteer, these are constellations of technologies, each with their own mythology, each with their own whims and fancies. It is impossible to fully understand them; only contracts beyond the cybernetic rhetorics of control and automation can be made. Friends, colleagues, lovers. Beyond a paralysis or a fetishisation of their errors and glitches, an abstraction is required to communicate with them, as idiosyncratic characters. They bring ancient concepts to bear on contemporary discussions embodying philosophical, technological, mathematical, and cultural motifs. Here, time is figured, sculpted, and played. The clockwork of the cosmos, on stage as theatrical Automata.
The elephant leaves the court, as time moves on.
1206 - Al-Jazari builds the Elephant Clock representing the cultures of the world. The timing mechanism is based on a water-filled basin hidden inside the elephant and is outlined in his “Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices”.
4. As the Theatre Unfolds, the Pantomimes Run Amok
The fool returns your gaze as you juggle identities – Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn; friends, family, colleagues. Delicately balanced on the blue marble, embodied paradoxes, all of us. Images of images of images, filters upon filters upon filters, intertwined with the spirals of DNA. Every mask revealing a new truth; role-play as warrior, general, politician, artist.
The coded silent antics of the pantomime adapts the senses. The silence gives way to synesthesia as things appear by the sleight of the hand. Synthetic sensations begin to be articulated as colour starts to acquire an odour, sounds begin to acquire a taste.
The artificially intelligent pantomime can expertly mimic any machine, any craft, any mannerism, any sentiment. On stage it is any character, any role. However, much like the butterflies that mimic leaves to camouflage their wings, the mimicry spills over and acquires a life of its own. It spills over into the realm of beauty and humour, beyond the instincts of survival; an ornament to be worn in public. The cosmetics of LARPing come into full swing, introducing an alienation; a persona emerges, an invariance is articulated; objects and subjects, bodies and minds intermingle, and natures and technologies perform an endless a pas de deux. Simultaneously wave and particle, quark and clown, these personas live in many domains at once.
This is no place for identity, you put on yet another mask.
1974 - Dungeons & Dragons, a digest-sized boxed set by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson is released as the first role-playing game with a total budget of 2000$. By some accounts more than 20 million people have played the game to date.
5. As the Scene Unfolds, the Acrobats Suspend Gracefully
The laws of Newtonian physics are fully valid but seem suspended as the quantum physical sets the stage and is set on stage. The pirouetting ballerina doesn’t seem to notice. Particles leap from one act to the other, stories travel with light speed, trapeze artists balance on wave functions, all while a bear rides a bicycle in a circle. Certain physics are suspended, for certain fantasies to take flight.
Amidst this spectacle of lightness, new contracts emerge. New contracts in a new plane of physics. Each action, each movement, each contortion, in dialogue with the universe. Bravery, gallantry, chivalry, and trust star in every ascent, as in every fall. The apparently disjointed acts start to slowly synchronise, acquiring a new rhythm at every new scale. The minuscule and monumental, sing their own songs, celebrating their new found connections. A new intuition, a new virtuosity, a new grace takes shape in the air thick with entanglements.
You know it is artificial, but it feels good to be part of something beautiful.
1998 - 2008 - The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the world’s highest-energy particle collider is built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) crossing the border between Switzerland and France at four points.
6. As Life Unfolds, the Circus Folds
As night falls, the elaborate fabrication of the circus folds. The theatre of possible relationships; the circles, circuits, and ciphers go back inside the valise. The tent drops revealing the starry sky as this microcosm and time-lapse takes a bow for the night. The vastness inverts, giving way to a miniature; private, intensive, and portable. Tomorrow it will travel to another locality. The alchemical automata, the instruments of measurement, the lusus naturae, all.
A new prospect is revealed: rivers, oceans, mountains and the metropolis; nomads, immigrants, natives and the aliens; laughter, silence, screams, and whispers.
Spaces containing objects and object containing spaces. Models of the world, and the world of models. Miniatures of life, and the life of miniatures. Inside-out, outside-in.
As the sounds of the event subside, you ask yourself: “Did the circus disappear, or did we just stop looking?”
1470 - 1480 - Sandro Botticelli paints the “Primavera”, by some accounts as a pair to the Birth of Venus. At least 500 plant species, along with 190 flowers were meticulously documented to take part in the mythology of Spring.
