Black Void, emerging art and science group, writes new vocabulary for digital nature
The art and science creative group Black Void debuted at the Beijing Contemporary Art Expo Reunion and was featured in the short documentary “Retrieving Beauty” , produced by China Central Television.
Black Void has released two art projects. Twin Cloud is a data-driven generative art collection that reveals atmosphere as the imprints of human ground activities. Biosphere 3 creates a new vocabulary of digital life on Mars that challenges the history of human space colonization. The two inaugural projects express the group’s vision in redefining the sustainable future, interspecies relationships and digital life through the use of new technology. Both artworks are supported by meticulous analysis of climate data and life generation.
Black Void comprises a group of artists, architects, data scientists, developers and musicians from Tsinghua University (Future Laboratory) and Rhode Island School of Design. It contributes to the foundation for art and science collaboration.
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Twin Cloud (left), Biosphere 3 (Right), Created by Black Void
When asked about the group’s future aspirations, Yixuan, Black Void’s leader, said, “As artificial intelligence and blockchain evolve and grow within the internet, resembling a new form of life, and as decentralized networks extend ‘self’ to countless nodes in the cloud, our relationship with digital life and the hybrid nature is being redefined. We aspire to participate in the construction of new life and ecosystems through art.”
The Biosphere 3 project simulates the Mars wilderness in a digital environment, choosing the most hospitable region, the Greek plain, and planting thousands of mushrooms. Each mushroom is nurtured within an ecological bubble that simulates the growth environment of the Earth, with the bubble gradually metabolizing and disappearing as the mushroom matures. Mars mushrooms adapt to the new environment through continuous mutations, becoming a new form of life that combines silicon and carbon.
In the creative process, the artist has built a responsive system between environmental parameters and mushroom morphology as well as a new paradigm of digital life forms. Mycelial tendrils can communicate using electrical signals, even developing their own vocabulary. The abundant space radiation becomes a new source of nourishment for the mushrooms. The mushrooms absorb different types of radiation by adjusting the distribution of surface pigments.
Biosphere 3 seeks to challenge the assumption of human expansion through space colonization. Throughout the iterative process of the artwork, the project attempts to create a vocabulary repository for the mechanisms of life, showcasing the parallel operation of diverse life forms and the influence of digital life on the concept of nature.
Twin Cloud builds a meteorological database of greenhouse gases, aerosol pollutants, temperature, humidity and geography from thousands of cities worldwide to generate location and time-based digital cloud sculptures. Sulfur dioxide reflects the degree of industrialization while dust aerosols demonstrate the level of desertification. The data determine the shapes, movement patterns, colors and textures of each digital cloud. Followed by an accumulation of the chemicals, a soft and sparse cloud changes into a chaotic and violent one. Twin Cloud is also a silent witness of key environmental events in the past three years, from Amazon mountain fire to Russian-Ukraine warfare.
The goal of carbon neutrality, combined with the development of cutting-edge technologies, has become a worldwide topic. Black Void tries to build a model of digital sustainability that bridges the gap between the grand scale of climate and the intimate scale of human sensation, between the satellites’ observations and human perceptions through the art of data.
Project Credit:
Biosphere 3, created by Black Void
Team: Yixuan, Yuhan, Hong Yun, Chen Bingbing
Twin Cloud, created by Black Void
Team: Yixuan, Hong Yun, NILLab, Jieying, TASHI DELÄK, Joanana Wang
Black Void is an art and science creative group, established by artists Yixuan, Hong Yun, and many other members, spanning various fields including architecture, new media art, data science, algorithm, and experimental music. The group is commited to explore the new distribution and generative mechanism of art using cutting-edge technologies. It aspires to participate in the construction of new digital life and ecosystems through the power of art. Topics of interests cover climate change, interstellar species, and the virtual physical fusion.
Biosphere 3
Inspired by astromycology and the Biosphere 2 experiment, Biosphere 3 is derived from a simple scientific hypothesis: Humanity has always dreamed of finding suitable habitats beyond Earth. Could mushrooms be the first to immigrate to Mars before humans and shape the Martian environment through the powerful transformative abilities of plants?The Biosphere 3 project simulates the Mars wilderness in a digital environment, choosing the most hospitable region, the Greek plain, and planting thousands of mushrooms. Each mushroom is nurtured within an ecological bubble that simulates the growth environment of the Earth, with the bubble gradually metabolizing and disappearing as the mushroom matures. Mars mushrooms adapt to the new environment through continuous mutations, becoming a new form of life that combines silicon and carbon.
In the creative process, the artist has built a responsive system between environmental parameters and mushroom morphology as well as a new paradigm of digital life forms. Mycelial tendrils can communicate using electrical signals, even developing their own vocabulary. The abundant space radiation becomes a new source of nourishment for the mushrooms. The mushrooms absorb different types of radiation by adjusting the distribution of surface pigments.
Biosphere 3 seeks to challenge the assumption of human expansion through space colonization. Throughout the iterative process of the artwork, the project attempts to create a vocabulary repository for the mechanisms of life, showcasing the parallel operation of diverse life forms and the influence of digital life on the concept of nature.
Twin Cloud
Chemicals produced by mountain fires, car exhaust and industrial emissions travel vast distances in the air as part of the clouds, reflecting human activities on the ground. When meteorological data translate into digital clouds, a sustainable model that connects the macro and the micro, the real and the virtual, is also born. Twin Cloud is a generative art collection driven by meteorological data. It debuted in 2022 at the 1st Annual METAVERSE Art@VENICE and was featured this year in the short documentary “Retrieving Beauty” produced by China Central Television, the most prestigious media in China. It has also won the first place in the 16th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium for visual data storytelling.Twin Cloud builds a meteorological database of greenhouse gases, aerosol pollutants, temperature, humidity and geography from thousands of cities worldwide to generate location and time-based digital cloud sculptures. Sulfur dioxide reflects the degree of industrialization while dust aerosols demonstrate the level of desertification. The data determine the shapes, movement patterns, colors and textures of each digital cloud. Followed by an accumulation of the chemicals, a soft and sparse cloud changes into a chaotic and violent one. Twin Cloud is also a silent witness of key environmental events in the past three years, from Amazon mountain fire to Russian-Ukraine warfare.
The goal of carbon neutrality, combined with the development of cutting-edge technologies, has become a worldwide topic. Black Void tries to build a model of digital sustainability that bridges the gap between the grand scale of climate and the intimate scale of human sensation, between the satellites’ observations and human perceptions through the art of data.
Project Credit:
Biosphere 3, created by Black Void
Team: Yixuan, Yuhan, Hong Yun, Chen Bingbing
Twin Cloud, created by Black Void
Team: Yixuan, Hong Yun, NILLab, Jieying, TASHI DELÄK, Joanana Wang
Black Void is an art and science creative group, established by artists Yixuan, Hong Yun, and many other members, spanning various fields including architecture, new media art, data science, algorithm, and experimental music. The group is commited to explore the new distribution and generative mechanism of art using cutting-edge technologies. It aspires to participate in the construction of new digital life and ecosystems through the power of art. Topics of interests cover climate change, interstellar species, and the virtual physical fusion.