Andy Gracie – Artist in Residence

Andy Gracie was resident at Atelier Salzamt for two weeks in July as part of the process for his new project MassiveBinaries, to be exhibited in the 2023 Ars Electronica festival. The project is being developed for the Randa Residency, a collaboration between Barcelona organisations HacTe, BIST, New Art Foundation and Institut Ramon Llull, and Ars Electronica.

Andy Gracie’s work generally involves close collaboration with scientific institutions and researchers and currently involves considering the fragility and impermanence of human existence compared to the unimaginable scale of the universe. He has made excursions into robotics, oceanography, cosmology, semiotics, apocalypse studies and spoken word, amongst others, in his attempts to understand.

Fotos: Andy Gracie

For Massive Binaries the collaboration has been with IFAE in Barcelona and specifically with scientists and engineers involved with the detection of merging binary stars through gravitational waves. One particular event, known as GW170817, becomes the focus for this narrative. The first Binary is represented by this pairof neutron stars – bound to each other, orbiting, and eventually merging generating huge amounts of energy and strange phenomena. A parallel binary in the work is the increasingly polarised opinions towards social and political ideologies in current society and how terminologies become weaponised. Massive Binaries usesAI – definer or destroyer of truth – to try to navigate and illustrate the complex forces at play when binary systems begin to react.During his time at Salzamt, Gracie was developing aspects of the project using AI and Unreal Engine with experts at Futurelab, while also working on the written narratives, musical score and video that all form part of the project.