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Artist duo A.A. Murakami has evolved their Floating World Genesis project into the physical world in a formidable physical installation by the same name. The original collection of 250 unique NFTs was inspired by the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953, which simulated conditions of the early Earth to explore how life first formed in the primordial oceans through self-organizing bubbles. The tranquil, meditative, and hypnotic qualities of Floating World Genesis are often associated with minimalist painting and the Light and Space movement. Bubbles have been an enduring source of inspiration for A.A. Murakami, whose seminal work New Spring (2017) is an interactive, multi-sensory installation that produces mist-filled blossoms.

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Floating World, the new physical installation, is A.A. Murakami’s largest undertaking to date. Spanning 25,000 square feet of area at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Floating World is divided across four “Texas-sized” spaces or rooms that envelop visitors in variations of the artists’ concept of “ephemeral tech,” where original technologies create sensory experiences that are both memorable and fleeting.

The genesis digital art collection chronicled the origins of life on earth. With the Floating World physical installation, A.A. Murakami takes this idea farther, provoking visitors to contemplate the meaning of life and the transitory nature of existence.

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Matching best in concept and visual likeness to the digital collection is the experience in the room with the GBMs, or giant bubble machines, original tech mechanisms developed by the artists that birth huge fog-filled bubbles up to eight feet in diameter. Once generated by the GBMs, the luminescent bubbles float like glittering pearls across the space, reflecting and refracting light, and evaporating seconds later as the soap film weakens and the fog disperses into the atmosphere. They are the real-life version of their digital counterparts. As each unique bubble expires, another follows behind.

A second space, lit from above by transparent tubes that contain flashes of neon light, recalls the vivid color palette produced by the algorithm in the digital art collection. The miniature bolts of colored lightning, conjured as if by magic or illusion, are created in fact from electromagnetic fields interacting with plasma (a mixture of ionized gases), the same phenomena that gives rise to the sun, earth’s life force.

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A.A. Murakami’s use of specialized physical and scientific technology to create ephemeral elements and unexpected experiences, echoes the novelty behind the algorithm in the digital artwork, where each iteration is unique and unpredictable. The artists delight in the element of surprise:

“It's the aspect of surprise that excites us, much like in our installations where we set up the conditions for a particular effect but then let the natural laws take over. There's a parallel here with nature—consider the genetic code and its vast expressions in the physical world. The beauty lies in the unpredictable, the way elements interact with each other and the environment.”

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The name, Floating World, is a reference to the genre of Japanese art popularized in the 18th century that celebrates life’s indulgences through depiction of everyday pleasures and material comforts. In the exhibition, the pleasure is in the passing beauty of floating bubbles and captured light, an invitation to find meaning by reveling in the wonder of the present moment.

Floating World is on display at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through September 21, 2025.

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Jimmy Herdberg

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