Exploiting the physical characteristics of thermocromatic crystals, Ιρις/Iris is an installation playing on the principle of the non-existence of colours outside the interaction of matter and light.

The inner surface of the installation is traversed by hot and cold air flows, which heat and cool the liquid crystals. This change in temperature physically intervenes at the structural level of the material, modifying the arrangement of the molecules, thus creating the colour shifts. The changing colours then become traces of the air itself, visualising flows of heat and cold invisible to the naked eye. 

As the greek Greek goddess and messenger of the gods Iris, who, descending from Mount Olympus to bring a message to earth, was leaving rainbows as a sign of her passage, Ιρις/Iris makes visible in her everchanging colours the traces of the changing air fluxes that invest the installation.

Spotlies is conceived as a warning against oversimplifications, lack of knowledge, bad faith or misinterpretation that can transform statistical visualisations, to the point of radically changing their meaning.

Data is essential information to objectivise situations, communicate scientific facts, support our opinions and guide our decisions. Numbers do not lie. But the ways they are collected, represented and interpreted introduce an element of subjectivity that can distort the reality of the facts, alter our reasoning and mislead our judgement.

Through a series of three recognisable situations, reminiscents of animation films sets, short stories come to life thanks to a layer of microprojections animating the scenes. 

These scenarios tell short stories we all know: the evening news, a politician’s speech, a youtuber’s video content. They all support their arguments with graphic representations that can deceive their audience. A heterodiegetic character then comments on the scenes to point out errors in data visualisation and share some tips on how to spot the lies.  

In a post-pandemic world, data, infographics and numbers have entered our daily lives. Faced with this information overload, how can we all develop mental tools to sharpen our critical thinking skills?

Rotifers are fascinating multicellular animals evolving on Earth for more than sixty million years. Though smaller than a millimeter, they represent a scandal in evolutionary biology: asexual females clone themselves without any intervention of males.

Moreover, these small organisms are extremely stress tolerant. They can resist to various stresses such as desiccation, radiation and freezing. Recently, scientists were able to revive rotifers that had been slumbering in the Arctic permafrost for 24,000 years. These microscopic superwomen raise challenging and inspiring questions for science.

Rotifer (a)live provides insight into the fascinating experiments and findings that researchers conduct on this matter on a daily basis. Shaped as an oversized scientific set-up, this installation takes the visitor on a journey into the world of research labs. Displayed in a retro futuristic arrangement, Rotifer (a)live combines scientific instruments and artworks. Omnipresent in this lab-like organized mess, the green leaf color provides a visual contrast that echoes the rotifers’ favorite food: salad juice.

This installation also shows the high-tech aerospace modules that transported rotifers back and forth to the International Space Station (ISS), as part of the Rotifer In SpacE (RISE), which studies rotifers to develop new models in space research. In addition to colorful microscopic photographs, lab pipettes, hand-drawn illustrations and Erlenmeyer flasks, this set–up mainly contains the rotifers themselves. So feel free to take a look at the microscope and projected lab footage to see live how rotifers come alive, how they behave, how they evolve.