Minimaforms: The Order of Time

On view in the AA Gallery from Friday April 28, 2023, The Order of Time is an immersive installation by Minimaforms, the practice of Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos. It features sculptural works that reveal the ordering of space and our constructed relationships through direct experiential discovery. Situated at the intersection of physics, art and architecture, The Order of Time engages in our agency and understanding of the world. In 1969, George Spencer Brown published his seminal book Laws of Form—an attempt to straddle the boundaries between mathematics and philosophy in which he declared: “Draw a distinction and a universe comes into being.” This brief statement outlines the paradoxes of world-building and our relationship to these processes. If our understanding of the world is ours alone, then without action this understanding remains inaccessible to others. Rather than something shared and mutually understood, the “world” is plural, situated and in a process of continuous formation. Worlds within worlds are made legible through a cosmology of observations. 

Physicist and author Carlo Rovelli reminds us that in physics, there is no future or past; everything understood remains in the ever-present. The Order of Time speaks to this understanding of time(s) as something situated and relational, examining world-building at infinite resolutions from the subatomic to the cosmological. Its three sculptural works shift scales and magnitudes, revealing this dynamic interplay through direct experience: everything you see is your own invention. The installation bridges art, science and technology, examining the forces of algorithmic structuring and the simulation of life. Building on John von Neumann’s research into self-replicating machines, the invention of cellular automata and John Conway’s Game of Life, the resultant three sections of time speak to the complex interactions of these associative rules within the construction of a model, in the spirit of Charles and Ray Eames’ seminal short film Powers of Ten. The exhibition includes a conversation between Carlo Rovelli and Theodore Spyropoulos, drawings, films, and a series of generative studies that further expand on the installation.  

The work was originally commissioned as part of an exhibition that celebrated the life and work of Yona Friedman and was produced by Le Quadrilatère—Centre d’art de Beauvais, the Centre National Édition Art Image (CNEAI) and the Frac Grand Large—Hauts-de-France, in partnership with Idem + Arts and the Frac Picardie from the CNEA Yona Friedman Foundation.  

Minimaforms was founded by brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos as an experimental practice that straddles art, design, science and technology, fostering frameworks that foreground human and emotive experiences. Their work has been acquired by international art and architecture collections that include the FRAC Centre, the Signum Foundation and the M+ / Archigram Archive in Hong Kong. They have been exhibited internationally including at MOMA New York, the Barbican Centre, the FRAC Centre Orleans, the Onassis Cultural Centre, Somerset House, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Leonardo Da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology, the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm, the Guangdong Science Centre and the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) London.