A newly commissioned artwork by Janet Echelman at the MIT Museum turns climate data into a massive soft sculpture and potentially dread-inducing information into a magical, whimsical object.
The project, called “Remembering the Future,” is nestled in the museum’s main lobby, free to view. A colorful network of knotted rope and twine hangs from the ceiling, with curved stripes of green and blue and striking pops of orange in the center.
The sculpture has two main parts. The historical data on the left traces climate from the last ice age to the present. On the right, speculative data modeling a variety of possible climate futures leads up toward the stairs. It’s mystical and somewhat sad to see this information in physical form, with the past and our uncertain future joined by one fragile rope in the middle.
Echelman has made these large net sculptures for decades at increasingly grander scales and with higher degrees of technological sophistication. She was inspired to use the form in the 2000s after seeing fishers and their nets on a beach in India; now, a team of technologists and helpers helps her achieve these feats of fabrication.
The story of her artistic practice is also one of technological development. As discussed in “Radical Softness,” a new collection about Echelman’s work edited by Gloria Sutton, there wasn’t a simulation tool at the time Echelman started that could accurately simulate the visuals of the structures she designed while accounting for gravity and other physical constraints.
The technology has come a long way. Now, Echelman uses computational methods in her design process to simulate gravity and other effects on the object using a tool developed by Adam Burke as part of her two-year artist residency at MIT.
Nets are highly complex structures, flexible to outside forces yet unpredictable. “Remembering the Future” is a beautiful exercise in “found form,” or the shapes that come about when human designs and physical reality collide. A simulated version of the sculpture lets visitors adjust a slider, moving from the artist’s “first guess” of the structure to the “optimized” or real position the shape falls into.
“Remembering the Future” is a triumph in artist-scientist collaborations, and in science serving the artistic concept rather than the other way around. More importantly, the piece gives viewers a sense of wonder and possibility in what feels like an otherwise bleak time.
“Remembering the Future” at The MIT Museum, 314 Main St., Kendall Square, Cambridge. Free to view.
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