The Invisible College

The Invisible College

Matthew Ritchie is a contemporary artist based in New York who works in installation, performance, painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound. Ritchie’s work addresses questions about the nature of the universe and our understanding of it, and asks what these enigmas might look like when manifested through artistic creation.

As the 2018–21 Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT, Matthew Ritchie has created a multi-part transmedia artwork, The Invisible College. The central theme, as is often the case in Ritchie’s work, is the emergence of hidden narratives from the specific informational qualities of the site. At MIT, The Invisible College was inspired by new developments in artificial intelligence, collaborations with a multidisciplinary team of MIT faculty and students, and Sir Francis Bacon’s 1626 unfinished utopian science-fiction story, New Atlantis, which proposed the first description of the scientific method, ultimately becoming the model for research institutions like MIT. What has emerged from that confluence of ideas is a recursive reflection on experimental inquiry, embodied in a science fiction detective story set in an evocative, almost mythological version of MIT. 

The first part of The Invisible College manifested in early 2020 as a site specific performative VR game, House of Strangers, using Generative Adversarial Networks (StyleGAN and CycleGAN) and artificial intelligence (GPT-2) to generate imagery and content and featuring music by Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT. When the campus was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the VR game migrated across media to become a second work: Latent Island, that nested footage from the GAN’s and the VR game inside 360 video footage of the now empty campus.

The third iteration of the project, Color Confinement, premieres as part of the “Unfolding Intelligence” symposium. This even deeper recursion was also made without setting foot on the closed campus, using ‘actors’ derived from a video game engine. A richly textured mood piece, Color Confinement is a melancholy study of genre play, world building, and the physics of sight. Masked avatars representing the elementary colored quark and anti-quark particles called ‘Red’, ‘Green’, and ‘Blue’, move in and out of other informational narratives within the film, accompanied by the haunting score by Evan Ziporyn and Shara Nova, a further collaboration within this recursive structure. As these mysterious figures roam the almost deserted MIT campus, their activities might be read both as a meditation on the role of the masked persona in gaming and popular culture, and as a response to the masked world that defined 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The final iteration, House of Illusion, will feature the avatars reenacting scenes from the film in a large-scale public augmented reality work; completing the cycle from site information to site specific game, then to informational film, and finally back to the original physical site.

Join Matthew Ritchie and and members of the project team in conversation:

Breakout Room: The Invisible College
Live Interactive Q&A Event with Matthew Ritchie, William Lockett, Shara Nova, Sarah Schwettmann, Sarah Wolozin, and Evan Ziporyn
Friday, April 9, 2021 / 11:00am EDT

Coming Soon

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