So I made it to Houston's MFA to catch the Floating World exhibition from A. A Murakami. I was stoked. Unreal and resonated in so many ways, it was definitely a bucket list item.

Spended a long time in the exhibition, actually went twice in the day. 

A guide mentioned the "GBMs" or gigantic bubble machines, and I knew I was in for a trip. So the main installation, Floating World, has eight GBMs mounted in a structure and programmed into a 12-minute choreography of light, smoke, and bubbles. 

I really enjoyed the fact that they have multiple bubble sources, so even when one of them "fails" to create bubbles, the choreography is not really affected. Part of the bubble phenomena is the intricate forces inside the bubble while forming, how it fights to become round and tall, the shapes that it goes through until it stabilizes.

From the exhibits:

In an era where technology redefines every facet of creativity, Maestros and the Machines invites us to reconsider the timeless masterpiece. Here, historical works are no longer revered as static relics but are reimagined as living, evolving frameworks-ready to be transformed, reinterpreted, and brought into the present.

The exhibition embraces a diverse range of mediums-painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and experimental art. Through tools like machine learning, algorithms, holographic projections, and 4DSound, classical forms are not merely reproduced but reinvented.

This is not a collection of replicas or tributes, but a groundbreaking exploration of the boundaries of permanence, authorship, and memory.

Thoughts:

A cool experience. Most of the rooms were intriguing, what shocked me was that even in an immersive experience, people tend to go through the exhibit pretty quickly. For example, in the first room, it's a 13-minute loop with projections on all walls and the floor, still people didn’t stay for the whole bit, is our attention span shortened over our evolution period? What's our real relationship with art? Are we interested or supposed to be interested? What do we think when we snap off the engagement with art pieces? 

The thing with techie pieces is that not all people are familiar, so a lot of it needs instructions to be toy around with, but we tend to imitate; it just takes 1 person to engage, and everyone wants to go next. In another room, a table had sensors for playing with the projection and the cool thing was that 2 kids were playing with it and one told the other “it senses you, this is how i pushed the ball” and maybe it was not about the force that the kid was employing but it worked.

There were a couple of rooms using mirrors as part of the immersiveness, which reminded me of Yayoi, but at the same time, it is the opposite. While Yayoi traps you in between the lights/exhibit and reflects, optimizing the square meters of the mirroring surface, also giving you a more personal experience. In "The Dragon" the artist puts the piece near the entrance and gives you space to walk around. It's more about looking and trying to figure it out, a mini promenade around the piece, and all the different points of view of the reflection. still interesting how kids react to it, they couldn’t comprehend at first, so they stopped running for a second. I have thoughts on two more exhibits, both using robots... 

The violin-playing robots have a sensor with a screen that shows you how it tracks you, but it's disconnected from the robot's performance. Some notice, some don't. The synths and keyboards next to it got played only by the curious, but as we grow older, not everyone has the itch to toy around with the things found? How can I put it, it's like some have lost the sense of wonder and wander on, or they were not intrigued enough to poke around the buttons.

The archetype is probably the most tangible part of the exhibition, but it's restrained behind glass because, well, people. The robot causes surprise to almost everyone, When it approaches people, they go: Oh whoa, hey bro. We tend to assign a persona to it. Is that how we understand things? By assuming, pressuming, and looking past that?

Personally I was captivated by the robot's home position with the rake up, and the way it erases the drawings or scribbles after a while, how it gathers and spreads the sand in its "beach" ecosystem.

That humanization is a recurring topic, when we bring machines closer to our sensibilities, our fragility, it's interesting how the outcome looks like.