Boris Acket plays with light for ‘transˈfɪɡə’, a dynamic collaboration with Beyond Space

Boris Acket, an audio-visual adventurer, can transform any room, landscape, or environment into something extraordinary. Acket transforms abstract ideas into immersive, sensory experiences: technology, space, light, and music all serve as prisms through which certain topics or subjects are explored and rematerialised. The effects are vivid and frequently mind-boggling, providing new perspective or meaning to the tried and true. Acket, for example, investigated how to interpret linear audiovisual animations by establishing an 80-meter-long line of lights and sounds. Based on the ideas and components of a modular synthesiser, he created a video about a new and circular planet. In a circular echo system, he investigated the subjective sense of time.

Design Studio Beyond Space and audio-visual artist, Boris Acket collaborated on a project where the 12 cubes, which housed the Certosa Initiative displayed during the day, transformed into a spatial sound and light composition called transˈfɪɡə after night. Acket, also a composer, makes “instruments of sound, light, and movement that act inside their own ruleset and environment”. transˈfɪɡə turns the entire room into one of these gigantic spatial instruments that span the entire hall.

Remi Versteeg, co-founder of Amsterdam architects Beyond Space and founder of the Certosa Initiative, says, “To us, it is a grand scale transformation, regardless of whether we are making permanent or temporary architecture. We organise the space, the signage, the routing, and transform it into a striking visual and spatial experience for both our exhibitors and visitors.”

Beyond Space used floor-to-ceiling, semi-transparent material to divide the large space into a succession of more intimate, tranquil exhibiting spaces, each that measured 9x9x9 metres. The visitor could go from one cube to the next, maybe even the next, but the layering of linen gradually threw a curtain over what lies just beyond. “Like that, the visitor manages to avoid the cacophony of different design objects competing not only with each other but also against the vastness of the space,” states Versteeg. 

It reminds us about the temporality of everything surrounding us and challenges us to see spaces for what they really are. – Boris Acket

Acket stated the following for his work. “Twelve cubes of light, situated on the floor, are able to transform the ‘walls’ of the spaces into segments and different shades of white. They are able to let the space act as one, but also as 192 segments moving in different directions. The instrument transforms walls into living and speaking entities. It reminds us about the temporality of everything surrounding us and challenges us to see spaces for what they really are: constant feedback loops of endless mutations; infinite instruments to interact with. The work is an ode to fluid thinking, to re-interpretation.”

Instead of relying on a single discipline to satisfy Acket’s curiosity, he acts as a conductor for a variety of forms: installation art, technology, live performance, sound, film, and installations, all of which work together to reveal a larger picture: an endless research project into the experience of time, space, natural elements, and music.

Different sized apertures in unexpected places took the viewer from one visual marvel to the next, each time allowing for a little reset, a fast cleansing to free up the mind for the next exhibit. Each presentation received both the attention (by ensuring that the routing passed through each plot) and the concentration (by providing temporary venues on a more intimate scale) that it deserved.

transˈfɪɡə was the spiritual successor of Transito, a collaboration between Beyond Space and Children of Light that made a lasting impression at the 2018 Salone at the Museum Diocesano. The Museum, a temporary project at the Palazzo Clerici during Milan Design Week 2019, included the archetypal elements of a traditional museum but deconstructed the arrangement of rooms to create a sensation of grandeur inside the half-scale building.

Also read: Boris Acket’s installations sit within a constellation of light, sound, and space

(Text by Vatsala Sethi, Asst. Editorial Coordinator (Arts))