Avant-Garde in Flight

TBD

Anicka Yi’s In Love With The World consists of two alien-like flying machines that hover astonishingly above the top floor of the New Museum as part of the exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future. The flying machines resemble organic squid- or spore-like creatures, suspended between biology and machinery. Each form has four soft, dangling legs and a mechanical device embedded at its center. The two differently-colored aerobes are activated in turn by staff nearby. As they move through the air, their soft limbs lightly brush against the museum’s walls, producing a strange, delicate, almost sentient choreography.

What makes the installation even more compelling is the relationship between these floating machines and the architectural works displayed below them. Beneath Yi’s aerobes are three architectural projects: Ghost Town by Bodys Isek Kingelez, a vibrant city of colorful paper models that imagines an optimistic future; Electric Labyrinth by Arata Isozaki, installed on the wall, where utopian architectural imagery is projected onto the ruins of Hiroshima; and New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys, which proposes a nomadic and anti-capitalist mode of life through a vision of floating, continuously transformable space.

Together, the flying machines and the architectural models form a powerful critique of how the future has been imagined. The flying machines reimagine technology as uncanny organic life forms drifting above the gallery, while the architectural works below present larger human systems of construction, speculation, and control, thus creating tension between two different ways of imagining the future: one through quasi-organic machines, and the other through architectural systems of human organization.