The End of Imagination IV

Adrián Villar Rojas creates collaboratively produced, ever-evolving, site-specific environmental projects that are both imposing and fragile. His research and world-building explores the conditions of a humanity at risk, on the verge of extinction or already extinct, where the future, the past and alternate versions of our present interact as a constantly changing totality.

The End of Imagination IV is a product of a sculptural experiment that Villar Rojas undertook as part of his major project for the inaugural Tank commission at the Art Gallery of NSW. Using an amalgamation of software systems collectively described as the ‘Time Engine’, Villar Rojas generated a series of intensely detailed digital worlds and placed virtual sculptures within them.

These digital worlds simulated conditions ranging from the environmental to the socio-political, across timespans ranging from hours to millennia. The virtual sculptures were scorched by fire, distorted by altered gravity. Unrest toppled them, wars wounded them. Other life forms sheltered within or bloomed upon them. The artist modelled worlds, which in turn modelled the sculptures. Then, in the crucial final phase of the project, he and his team commenced the labour of reconstructing them physically.

Made with forensic intensity in a temporary workshop in Rosario, Argentina, where hands-on making was combined with machine intelligence, this sculpture is a complex layered composite of salvaged, recycled, synthetic and organic material, which embodies the turbulence and traumas of times gone and times yet to come. It is of a sculpture made of many sculptures with a surface that is full of both speculation and detail – from an exquisitely rendered birds nest to a graveyard of bones and the imprints of ancient aquatic microworlds.