Metahaven: Chaos Theory

Founded by Dutch artists Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden in 2007, Metahaven is a renowned artist collective whose work blurs the boundaries of art, filmmaking and design. Encompassing a broad variety of mediums including moving images, exhibition design, graphics, digital interfaces, and theory, Metahaven is regarded today as a visionary agent in the advancement of post-digital, critical culture.

Metahaven's recent film piece, Chaos Theory (2021), is an enthralling audiovisual poem structured around the dialogues and wanderings of two characters: X (Valentina Di Mondo) and Y/Z (Georgina Dávid), as they reflectively confront the contemporary world and its puzzling flows of interconnected phenomena. Avoiding the use of conventional narrative language and the binaries of information technology, Chaos Theory operates as a non-linear tale challenging the divisions between fiction and fact, shared realities and dreams. Shot on location in the outskirts of Amsterdam, the movie's landscape appears in contrast with its dreamlike scenes and the open-ended poetics of its dialogues. Likewise, the newly-conceived installation of this work spatially challenges the limits of the film screen by means of a large textile work that expands in the Museum's main gallery. This textile echoes some of the graphic patterns and objects that appear in the story, referencing data points and graphic vectors blended into a thick texture and color coding that is reminiscent of common upholstery motives in public transit.