2025

Multi-channel video and sound installation (composition for 4-part male choir), LED light fixture (iron, acrylic panel, LED panels electronic controller), spherical speakers (3D-printed PLA, speaker driver, LCD screen, custom-software); duration 28:00.

“Pavilion explores the legacy of the film THINK, created by Charles and Ray Eames for the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. At the dawn of the computer age, THINK pictured computers as models of how the human mind both receives and processes information, immersing audiences in a dynamic stream of images, sounds, and ideas. Taking as a point of departure THINK’s multiscreen setup and its distinctive orchestration of audio-visual rhythm, Pavilion revisits this early precursor to database cinema, and reflects upon the optimism and apprehension that shaped its cultural context, at a time when generative AI has exponentially increased the scale and speed of data patterning. Pavilion integrates filmed and archival material, and uses generative AI to composite footages iteratively.

As a forerunner of database cinema, THINK broke with linear narrative, using multi-source media and fragmented images to stage an information architecture. Young extends this formal lineage by drawing cross-temporal comparisons between the fragmentary logics of 1960s multi-source media, sixteenth-century cabinet of curiosities (Wunderkammer), and generative AI — probing how databases in different eras entangled time, space, and narrative.

For the music, Young adopts the concert-Requiem as a guiding motif, prompted by his interest in the tension between HAL 9000, the sentient computer, and humans in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film famously employs György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, whose text comes from the Communion chant (Communio) of the Requiem Mass and evokes the threshold of death and the unknown. This imagery resonates with the film’s final sequence, where HAL’s glowing eye fades as the machine is shut down — leaving it uncertain whether we are witnessing the death of artificial intelligence, or a curtain call for human rationality.”