Mariko Mori’s alien whale space ship, suspended in the ethereal atmosphere of the top floor of Peter Zumthor’s art gallery in Bregenz, before it embarks on a world tour, hovers on the unstable borderline between large-scale sculpture and biomorphic architecture. Abstracted from time and place, it suggests a timeless space somehow projected into the future. It is the tangible but dream like representation of an ideal world.
Because, to quote Richard Serra, “places have the power to generate thoughts,” it alludes to a journey into an imaginary and infinitely remote place that “exists nowhere”. To experience it is like landing on that well favoured island envisaged by Sir Thomas More, the inventor of utopia.The whale form refers reassuringly to symbolism of the protective shell, with which the iconography and imaginary worlds of primordial myths are so richly endowed. And as such it alludes to a return to the original sources of happiness. The wave referred to in the title of the work (Wave UFO) is simultaneously an image of the inner movement of water, and of the cerebral frequencies on which our experience of the work hinges.
Belonging to a tradition unacquainted with the biblical adventures of Jonah, Mori simply declares that she did not want to use “a real architecture; I wanted a form originating from nature, like water, or flowers… something that would produce an effect of wonder and peacefulness. I love swimming and I am very fond of fish, but the form came to me by itself; I didn’t start from the significance of the whale”.
The structure is large enough to take three people at a time, a number that is itself far from accidental. To call them spectators hardly does them justice. Together they participate in Mori’s fantasy of an “interconnected world”, in which all living beings, and that includes aliens as well as humans and animals, are linked by the same source of vital energy. Wired up to the Whale’s computers the frequencies of their brainwaves are used to generate constantly fluctuating and moving images.
Technically the work is a prodigious achievement depending on dozens of individuals, and a list of organisations in a complex process of invention and technical sophisticated manufacturing. And Mori is quick to pay tribute to the many people who made it possible. “I can produce images and have ideas, but to fulfil and build them is a very different matter. It represents a completely different set of problems. Even just to transport the work, for example, you have to reckon with all sorts of restraints. The structure has to be light, easily dismantled, and so on. This project is a collective work involving the most outstanding people from every corner of the globe, experts in the most diverse fields.
The whole work was constructed by hand, indeed it can be described as a large-scale artefact. And if all that love and passion had not been poured into its construction with such marvellous dedication, this perfection would not have been achieved”. Mori worked in close contact with Marco Della Torre who made the architectural structure possible. Della Torre has previously collaborated with a series of artists including Claes Oldenburg, Vanessa Beecroft, Karsten Hoeller and Charles Ray. He has used Italy’s uniquely versatile industrial system and its openness to experimentation, to make large-scale visionary works of art. Della Torre first worked with Mori on the construction of her Dream Temple at the Fondazione Prada in 1999. The Whale UFO is even bigger and much more complex.
As an architectural problem it could be defined as the manufacture of a portable structure 11 metres long and 5 metres wide robust enough so that it can be broken up and packed into eight containers, and light enough to be shipped by truck or air and put back together on the sometimes not very strong floors of another gallery. To achieve the necessary lightness and strength it relies on a pioneering use of fibre glass as a structural material to make the beams for the whale’s ribcage. Predicting the behaviour of the structure under load required a complex mathematical analysis.
The structure is based on an aluminium drum with a 3-metre diameter, from which the rib framework develops and radiates. It is made of very strong rigid fibre glass elements, to which asymmetrical and irregular panels are applied with a very ingenuous system of articulated rods. It was assembled by Modelleria Angelino, a company based outside Turin that usually works for the car industry. Della Torre made models of beams in a composite sandwich of fibre glass and expanded foam and tested them to destruction. Equal care was taken over testing all the other materials used. The fluidity of space is suggested not only by the sinuous, biomorphic shapes of the whale, but also by the quality of its materials. Aluminium, fibre glass, methacrylate and Technogel seem to blend and flow together.
The whale’s skin, and its pearly finish which seems to produce no shade while radiating an iridescent and astral light, are the result of a technique based on the holographic ink used for banknotes specially made by Lechler, in Como. The seating, as well as the aliens, are moulded in Technogel, a half liquid, half solid material. Mori has impressively demonstrated the way in which an artist is uniquely equipped to push technical experimentation beyond its utilitarian limits toward aesthetic objectives.The project began in 1999 when she set about an attempt to represent the idea of ‘togetherness’. “Although the idea comes from nature, I didn’t want to depict a realistic image of the nature. I was more interested in bringing out an intimate, secret relationship. I wanted to restore the image of the spirit, or of a certain vital energy, and to represent it visually”. To achieve this she has made use of sophisticated real time animation and computer graphics to create a space in which light and sound (composed by Ken Ikeda) give people a demonstration of what cosmic fusion might mean.
The projection sequence takes seven minutes and, as well as showing the interaction of the three spectator’s brainwave frequencies, includes an animation of the artist’s own aesthetic visions. Mori has created a universe of abstract figures and biomorphic signs, articulated movements and lunar colours that suggest the entrance to a labyrinth. As you cross the threshold of the whale’s vast eye-hatch (thereby reiterating the power of that image as the threshold of consciousness), you come to the “visual womb”. Here the spectators recline on one of the three Technogel mats laid beneath the large carbon fibre cupola-screen. “By using technology and projection on a spherical surface, I try to immerse the spectator in a timeless and spaceless dimension”, says Mori. By treating cosmic unity as if it could be thought of as an original datum external to man, Mori tries to make it visible through an image.
The images on the screen inside the whale show globular forms that pulse in response to the cerebral activity of the three participants. When the frequencies of the three participants coincide, and the alpha waves associated with daydreams synchronise so that the usually independent right and left sides of the brains start to function in unison, the distinct elements merge to assume the shape of a ring. This only happens on very rare occasions and is the symbolic completion of the sense of cosmic unity evoked by the work. Working in real time the software processes data received from the inner brain, to produce an image that is constantly changing. Mori has used an analytical system developed by the Japanese engineer Masahiro Kahata to represent brainwaves.
Mori has exploited the data supplied by this system to work out a personal visualisation of different states of consciousness, generated by the intensity of cerebral frequencies. “I have tried to simplify the vision and interpretation of data originating from brainwaves. When the alpha waves prevail, the movement is delicate and blue. Interfacing helped me to visualise the phenomenon of synchronisation between bodies and the image of the ring”. You don’t have to accept any of this to be able to appreciate what Mori has achieved as an aesthetic experience. Whether or not the Whale UFO is about visionary architecture, a magic lantern, or about a gigantic microscope directed at the artist’s inner world, Mori has focussed people onto their own thoughts and drawn them into the dreamland that she has created. F.P.
