"Techno-sublime" is how Leesa Fanning, the museum's assistant curator of modern and contemporary art, describes Manglano-Ovalle's piece, which is really a cosmic "lie."
The thousands of lights twinkling across the three huge screens in the darkened gallery are not a video of outer space but a computer-generated digital invention.
Nor does this continuous display loop like a video. At the end of each 15-minute cycle, in which 10,000 to 300,000 "stars" appear on the screens, the computer regenerates a whole new cosmos.
In his cyber way, the artist plays God.
"Vanishing Sky" -- while not exactly awe-inspiring -- is an effective piece of conceptual art that has less to do with the majesty of the Cosmos than the powers of computatation. The forever-regenerating starscape recalls Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument and Rudy Rucker's "universal automatism." I found myself drawn to the imaginary worlds promised by the endlessly synthesized stars.
Ironically, the piece actually benefits from the discreetly illuminated sound-board affixed to the far wall; it pulsates with LEDs that suggest an abiding intelligence like that of Clarke and Kubrick's HAL 9000.
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