Universal Everything Hosts an Interactive Art Experience at 180 Studios in London

During Milan Design Week 2017, the Unconfined: The Galaxy S8 installation brought the design philosophy of Samsung to life through an interactive art experience where visitors wandered through a maze of overscale suspended organic shapes incor­porating digitized motifs, able to create mesmerizing avatars on the electronics company’s mobile app. It was a much-buzzed about collaboration between Zaha Hadid Architects and Universal Everything, a digital art collective founded in 2004 by graphic designer Matt Pyke that counts Apple, Hyundai, and Radiohead among its other clients.

This fall, at 180 The Strand in London, the studio is the sole star of the show in “Lifeforms,” an exhibition of 14 moving-image works that evolve and shift with time and interaction, meaning no visitor sees the same thing twice. “We’re interested in how living forms can be represented through the eyes of today’s generative technology—from the movement of a single figure tracked using motion capture to a simulation of a crowd of thousands revealing collective patterns of human behavior,” Pyke says of the content he and his core team of architects, creative directors, and technologists produce. For this show, UE partnered with Ab Rogers Design to create a series of “habitats” for each life form, yielding an experience similar to exploring a parklike digital ecosystem.