Andreea Saioc,

Editor (Art)

 

Tomas Saraceno is an Argentinean visionary artist who has been living and working between and beyond planet Earth ever since he can remember. Or at least since 1973.

Saraceno’s year of 2012 begun under the sign of reverie, with the astounding Cloud City installation being erected on top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Then the project ‘On Space Time Foam’ followed, in Milan, Italy. A continuation of one of Saraceno’s permanent themes of creation- that is the abolition of limits, be they environmental, cultural or social- this installation draws its roots from 20th century utopian architecture. The soul of an artist merged with the education of an architect and that is how Saraceno came to continue the creative efforts of utopian structures by building aerial constructions with low impact on the environment.

‘On Space Time Foam’ is a 65 feet tall and 1200 square meters wide, three leveled, suspended structure constructed from clear film, that took months of preparation and trialing to be ready for public exhibition. In this process, Saraceno collaborated with an entire team of engineers and benefited from the assistance of Lindstrand Technologies, a company that is famed for researching and producing such marvelous, Jules Vernian things as hot-air balloons or space vehicles.

The structure is encompassed between the ceiling and the floor, or ‘sky’ and ‘earth’, as the artist chose to call them. In this ultimately flexible, vastly changeable edifice, those who adventure to enter must be aware that ‘each step, each breath, modifies the entire space’ and that is ‘a metaphor for how our interrelations affect the Earth and our universes.’ Every one of the three levels of the structure has its own climate and air pressure, which makes the clear film construction be a micro-world in its own right. This assiduously planned ahead project will be transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s new Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), as Saraceno will be MIT’s inaugural Visiting Artist.