24 Hour Cosmos Series
Anchoring 37 Dimensions, Tajima’s new series 24 Hour Cosmos extends the ethos of her 2024 sculpture Sense Object (January 1, 2023, United States), a portrait of national sentiment across a single day created by analyzing social media data and compressing it within a 5d memory crystal. Amassing text-based datasets of news events from around the world, each 24 Hour Cosmos work aggregates data from one day and translates it into material abstraction, encoding it into the surface of the work to create a portrait of the day in shimmering luminescence, like a measurement of changing light from a camera’s long exposure. The word “cosmos” refers to the universe or a complex, orderly system, and these works are also subtitled for the days they reference. These ethereal wall-mounted pieces have varying holographic surfaces, measuring interconnected global events and moods as prismatic color and shifting visibility and luminosity that respond to the viewer’s positioning.
Like much of Tajima’s work, 24 Hour Cosmos is process-oriented, and in this case it employs photonics, optoelectronics, machine learning, and customized data analysis systems. In collaboration with technicians and engineers, the artist developed a machine that laser etches diffracted data points onto photopolymer film, taking up to 200 hours for each piece. Custom code employing analytics collects and transforms the entangled footprint of international news cycles into distinct clusters and point of light and color. In an age defined by big data and high-velocity digital life, the works reflect the dissonance between individual experience and the universal while also evoking the ephemeral, dynamic nature of humanity beyond data and the multiplicity of perspectives embedded in interwoven global events.
