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The Morning Line

The Morning Line is a collaboration with the artist Matthew Ritchie and Daniel Bosia of Arup’s AGU and was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. The project is conceived by Ritchie as a collaborative platform to explore the interplay of art, architecture, cosmology and music. Imagined as a ruin from the future, The Morning Line is a drawing in space, where each line connects to other lines to form a network of intertwining figures and narratives with no single beginning or end, entrance or exit, only movements around multiple centers that together trace out a dense web of ideas concerning the history and structure of the universe and our place in it.

Within the drawing, other information layers animate the structure. The piece is outfitted with a sophisticated arrangement of speakers and controls designed by Tony Myatt of the Music Research Centre of York University, which transform the piece into an innovative spatialized sound environment. Over the course of the Morning Line’s installations, guest curators invite composers to produce site-specific works for each installation, treating visitors to music and sound performances that move through the space around them.

At the heart of the Morning Line is “the bit”. A fractal building block that grows and scales by a fixed ratio in three dimensions to produce the lines, spaces and structure of the piece. Each bit is interchangeable, demountable, portable and recyclable, allowing the piece to change and adapt physically over time along with its sonic content. To date, the Morning Line has travelled from Seville, Spain to Istanbul, Turkey to Vienna, Austria, constantly adapting its form to its new site. It is currently in the permanent collection of the ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany.