Robin Meier will bring fireflies, LED lights and a multitude of crickets to Art Basel this year. The Paris-based Swiss artist and composer has combined these elements in a major new immersive installation at the Volkshaus in the city centre. The work, called Synchronicity, is the inaugural art commission awarded by Audemars Piguet, the Swiss luxury watchmaker.
Meier’s interest in pattern formations in nature, and the emergence of collective intelligence, underpins the piece. Inside a large, darkened tent, visitors encounter light-emitting fireflies, flashing in tandem with the LED sequences. “There will be an interaction between the artificial intelligence [the lights] and the collective intelligence of the insects,” says Meier, who has analysed algorithms linked to the natural behaviour of fireflies.
Music plays and everything, including the crickets, moves to the same beat. “I have come to realise that natural phenomena can be simulated on a computer. How the living organisms relate to the machines will be compelling,” he adds.
Talks are under way to show the installation later this year in Paris at the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard.
Ways of seeing
The independent curator Marc-Olivier Wahler, the former director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, who has organised the Basel commission, says that the idea of exploring synchronicity, and “trying to a certain extent to point out, outside of the art world, a certain way of doing or seeing things” helped Meier secure the commission.
Meier, who also works as a music designer for Ircam/Centre Pompidou in Paris, is a strong believer in mixing art and science. “Art is a means of talking about science in a more subjective way,” he says. “Science may be able to reveal how societies emerge, for instance, but art is a way of expressing and understanding these experiences.”
He has drawn on a wide variety of sources and organisations to realise the ambitious installation. At the start of the commission process, he visited the headquarters of Audemars Piguet in Le Brassus in Switzerland, gaining insights into the 140-year-old firm’s tradition of craftsmanship. “I expected to see specialist machinery but it is fascinating to see everything made by hand,” Meier says. The watchmaking process feeds into the synchronisation concept.
Audemars Piguet helped Meier to develop the project, forging links with scientists, genetic engineering experts and organisations such as the Papiliorama Foundation in Kerzers, Switzerland, which raises awareness of the diversity of indigenous and tropical fauna and flora. “The fireflies will go back to the foundation,” Meier says.
Audemars Piguet is, meanwhile, expanding its art empire. In 2013, the company became a “global associate partner” of Art Basel. In 2014, it unveiled a new booth in the Collectors Lounge at the Swiss fair, designed by Mathieu Lehanneur of France. “Lehanneur’s lounge concept will be presented at Art Basel this year,” says a company spokeswoman.
• Robin Meier: Synchronicity—Fireflies, Crickets and Machines, 17-21 June, 10am-8pm, Volkshaus Basel, Rebgasse 12-14
• Synchronicity—It’s No Coincidence: a Conversation between Art and Science, moderated by Anna Somers Cocks, the chief executive of The Art Newspaper, featuring Robin Meier, Michael Greenfield of the Institute of Research on Insect Biology at the University of Tours and Michael Friedman, the Audemars Piguet historian, 18 June, 3pm