Circus Family at Smithsonian FUTURES
Role: Producer
Year: 2021
City: Washington D.C. & Doha
Hi! How R U? 😎 was a site-specific installation at the Smithsonian Institute’s Art and Industries Building, which allowed visitors to the FUTURES exhibition in Washington D.C. to share their message to the future in a holographic time capsule experience. A second location in Doha, Qatar was created so people can interact with each other and share stories beyond time and space.
The installation was placed in the Futures that Unite hall, a space devoted to exploring the many ways people relate, connect and embrace collective humanity. Our ability to instantly reach each other across space and time is a hallmark of the present. As we make decisions about the future, the power of human connection revealed by the holo-capsule makes the case that we should place the greatest value on one another.
The concept, brought to life by artist collective Circus Family, is inspired by time capsules’ ability to preserve a unique present moment for future generations. The work aims to recreate the experience using today’s forms of communication. Avatars first appeared on WhatsApp-style visuals and emoji-filled texts, later becoming blurred messages overlaid against FaceTime screens, Instagram direct messages, then email, fax and telephone conversations before culminating in a beeping visualized morse code. Curated by Ashley Molese, and realized by Wout Westen, Cas Dekker, Bas van Diejen and Joris Titawano. The project was kindly supported by Dutch Culture USA and LG.
Read review here.
About CircusFamily
Established in 2007, Circus Family is an Amsterdam-based collective of installation artists and audiovisual designers with a passion for bringing challenging projects to life through graphic design, moving image, music and interactive technology.
Merging data, design and technology to explore new territories, Circus Family creates powerful audiovisual experiences animated by compelling stories. From concept to execution, their projects exude a signature visual identity, honed over the years via a broad range of expertise. The collective has evolved to challenge audience perceptions through exploration, research, learning, and above all, pioneering innovation.
Creating new formats to explore the moving image invites a deeper understanding of how people behave and interact with what they see. Circus Family works closely with their clients and the community to develop a shared language, therefore creating work reflecting the vision of everyone involved so that we are all invited to think a little bit differently.
With their self-initiated work, we aim to find undiscovered methods of narrative, questioning the ways people discover and open themselves up to new conceptual work.
About FUTURES
Part exhibition, part festival, FUTURES presented nearly 32,000 square feet of new immersive site-specific art installations, interactive experiences, working experiments, inventions, speculative designs, and “artifacts of the future,” as well as historic objects and discoveries from 23 of the Smithsonian’s museums, major initiatives, and research centers. Of the nearly 150 objects on view, several are making their public debut: an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven rover from Alphabet’s X that could transform agriculture; a Planetary Society space sail for deep space travel; a Loon internet balloon; the first full-scale Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome built in North America; the world’s first controlled thermonuclear fusion device; and more.