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Playing Lunatick<\/i><\/a>\u00a0by Antony Gormley and Priyamvada Natarajan for New Scientist, 27 March 2019<\/a><\/p>\n VISIT The Store X, a venue for art and design in London\u2019s West End, and you are in for quite a journey. Wearing an HTC Vive headset, you are given an island to explore in\u00a0Lunatick<\/i>, a glossy, game-like virtual-reality experience that starts at Kiribati in Micronesia. For a while, you have the run of the place by means of hand controllers, although producers\u00a0Acute Art<\/a>\u00a0plans to use EEG to let you control it with your thoughts.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t get too comfortable. Wandering past a stone platform triggers the space elevator. It lifts you gently off your feet, then propels you through the stratosphere. This long, beautiful and increasingly uncanny transit carries you into the void between the moon and Earth.<\/p>\n Take a breath. Look around you. The geometrical relationship between the sun, Earth and its moon unwinds around you as time skews and the moon swells. Before you know it, you are skating around lunar crater rims, plummeting into craters, flying high, until, losing control again, you are flung into the sun.<\/p>\n Lunatick<\/i>\u00a0is the first joint work by British artist\u00a0Antony Gormley<\/a>\u00a0and astrophysicist\u00a0Priyamvada Natarajan<\/a>\u00a0from Yale University. Natarajan visualises the accretion history of black holes, and maps the granularity of dark matter by studying the way it bends light \u2013 a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. But she couldn\u2019t resist the idea of giving space a sensual dimension by making the vastness and loneliness of the cosmos tangible.<\/p>\n Artist and scientist bonded over their early love of science fiction. H. G. Wells\u2019s 1901 novel\u00a0The First Men in the Moon<\/i>was Natarajan\u2019s contribution: a fictional journey powered by the mysterious gravity-less mineral cavorite. Gormley, in his turn, recalled C. S. Lewis\u2019s space trilogy that began with\u00a0Out of the Silent Planet<\/i>, in which a man travels the solar system pinned in a coffin.<\/p>\n Both influences emerge clearly enough in\u00a0Lunatick<\/i>, but the real star of the show isn\u2019t fictional: it is the flyable lunar terrain wrestled into shape by Rodrigo Marques, Acute Art\u2019s chief technology officer, from data sent back by NASA\u2019s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. \u201cThere\u2019s something both moving and funny about skating over the surface of the moon,\u201d says Gormley. \u201cI\u2019ve got very fond of skiing along the ridges then down into the crater bottoms.\u201d<\/p>\n Gormley\u2019s art is popular globally, not least because people find it easy to grasp. Never mind the cosmological and philosophical dimensions: what strikes the viewer is how he renders, in solid matter, the building blocks of our lives.<\/p>\n Gormley has been making sculptural art out of wireframes and voxels (three-dimensional pixels), even as architects and games designers having been moving away from model-making into a purely virtual 3D design space. \u201cUntil recently, I had no idea what a voxel was,\u201d says Gormley, who has spent more than five years making oddly expressive low-resolution sculptures assembled from cubes and cuboids. His wireframe experiments (assembled from real wires and rods) are older still, dating back to the late 1990s.<\/p>\n Why has Gormley chosen to enter the virtual realm now? First,\u00a0Lunatick<\/i>\u00a0was a chance to explore a medium that, he says, is \u201cbloody useless at objects and bloody brilliant at space\u201d. Objects, ultimately, are bodies: VR is hobbled because it can\u2019t convey their mass and tactility. But space is different. We perceive space primarily through seeing, which means VR can convey scale and immensity to a sublime degree.<\/p>\n But why should an artist best known for exploring the sculptural possibilities of the human body (particularly his own) be keen on disembodied space? The image of body-as-spaceship crops up intermittently in Gormley\u2019s work, but rarely so urgently. He says he is haunted by an image of long-haul flight, where the shutters are down and everyone is watching movies: virtual versions of human life.<\/p>\n \u201cI want this piece to say to people, \u2018Break out!\u2019,\u201d he says. \u201cOf course we get very obsessed with human matters. But there are bigger affairs out there. Recognise your cosmic identity!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Playing Lunatick\u00a0by Antony Gormley and Priyamvada Natarajan for New Scientist, 27 March 2019 VISIT The Store X, a venue for art and design in London\u2019s West End, and you are in for quite a journey. Wearing an HTC Vive headset, … Continue reading