Genetologic Research

Tomás Saraceno
Iridescent Plant Medium with Lamp, 2009

The luminous and roughly human-height Iridescent Plant Medium with Lamp consists of a sphere dressed in a billowing sheath of iridescent foil in a dark room. Thoroughly otherworldly, the orb shivers and cowers in the corner like a specimen from space. NASA, it should be noted, sent plants on early space missions and began experimenting with aeroponics in the late 1990s. One can imagine the possibility of future cosmic plantations, a vision clearly encouraged by Saraceno’s installation.- Based on a text by Erin Rouse -

Sunny Day, Air-Port-City, 2006

As an architect Saraceno has for years been looking into the possibility of using large balloon-like constructions to enable the free circulation of persons and goods across the entire globe.

Martijn Hendriks
Gradually, then suddenly (white version), 2009

Still from a single channel altered video of a 1965 studio performance by Bruce Nauman, 1 min 59 sec

The existence of wormholes, shortcuts through spacetime, is still hotly debated.  Stephen Hawking gave a lecture touching on the possibility and the implications of traversable wormholes.  In theory, they would allow quick travel in space to even the most remote galaxies (you wouldn’t actually be travelling faster than the speed of light, but you would beat light to your destination, because it had to travel all the way around). More baffling still, they would allow time travel too. Hawking stated that if you could travel from one side of the galaxy to the other in a matter of a week or two, you could return through another wormhole, and be back before you started your journey. The theory only allows travel back in time, and only to the moment of the initial creation of the time machine.  Hawking again: a time machine will be built someday, but has not yet been built, so the tourists from the future cannot reach this far back in time.

- Based on a text by Brooke Ballantyne -

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Gravitational Bending, 2010

Even weirder than dark matter—the invisible stuff constituting most of the mass of the universe—is dark energy, a mysterious force pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate. Dark energy has been around for most of the history of the cosmos. “Nine billion years ago, dark energy was already wielding its repulsive influence on the universe,” explains Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Adam Riess. But the repulsion didn’t exceed the force of gravity until 5 billion years ago, when cosmic expansion kicked into high gear and began accelerating.

A pioneering space mission called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) delivered the first accurate account of the overall makeup of the universe. The answer is decidedly strange. Dark energy makes up 73 percent of the universe, dark matter another 23 percent. Atomic matter—everything around us and everything astronomers have ever seen—accounts for just 4  percent.

Comparing images from the Hubble Space Telescope’s high-end cameras with the WMAP heat signature map of the early universe, Riess and his colleagues retraced the growth history of the universe with unprecedented accuracy and depth. “It’s as if you mark the height of a child against a doorframe to measure growth spurts,” Riess says. For reasons as yet unknown, the antigravitational effects of dark energy are greater now than they were in the distant past. One theory, supported by the Hubble data, is that empty space is impregnated with residual energy from the Big Bang. As space expands, so does dark energy, while matter is spread out, weakening the inward pull of gravity.

Based on a text by Alex Stone

Chu Yun
Constellation, 2006

Galaxy made out of LED lights from various devices.