United Visual Artists
Musica Universalis is a spatial instrument by the London studio United Visual Artists. It comprises a series of kinetic physical sculptures, each containing a spherical form and a mechanism that drives a rotating light source and a speaker. Light is cast through the architecture as each cell turns; the oscillations of the cells slowly drift in and out of harmony with one another, and over time white light separates into its component frequencies. The studio's own record lists the materials as steel, acrylic, LED, electronics and code, at variable dimensions, and names Houston 2016 as the first of its presentations, ahead of Hobart, Barcelona and London.
The title is Pythagoras's term for the inaudible harmony he believed governed the movement of the heavens, and the work imagines the resonances of distant bodies in the solar system as a room of slowly turning light. At Day for Night it debuted in December 2016 in the post-office building, where its rotating beams swept the sorting-floor walls between the other installations.
