Gary Zhexi Zhang’s METAMERS

How real is a hallucination? Metamers are different states of physical reality which produce the same phenomenal experience. It is generally believed that what appears as mental representation corresponds, via the sensory apparatus of the body, to the reality of an external world. Upon waking from a dream, the ancient philosopher Zhuangzi wondered: had he been Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was Zhuangzi? The founder of psychophysics, Gustav Fechner, theorized mind and body—which he extended to the inanimate world—as a curve which is convex from one view and concave from another; he sought to scientifically measure their duality. Contemporary neurological evidence demonstrates that far more of our reality is made in the mind than we may like to believe: we live in a world that dreams of us, far more than we can dream of it.

Unfolding as a psychological and acoustic descent inside anonymous subterranean architectures, METAMERS is an extended hallucination, invoking exchanges between the history of perceptual knowledge and the development of industry, war, and primordial biological memory. Time flows, but without spatial constancy; like a dream, ambiences breathe through one another across icons, portals, and rhymes. A frog watches, but we do not know what its eyes are telling its brain.

Gary Zhexi Zhang (SMACT ’19) is interested in unstable knowledge. Operating individually, in collaboration and within organizational frameworks, his work explores systemic connections between cosmology, technology, and economy. He recently edited Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023), a book about time which brings together finance, science fictions, and interviews with leading climate modelers. The opera he cowrote with Waste Paper Opera, Dead Cat Bounce, premiered at Somerset House in 2022 and tours in 2024. In September 2023 he presented The Tourist, a documentary essay exploring an uneasy exchange between Afrofuturism and Sinofuturism via the life of Zanzibari revolutionary Ali Sultan Issa.

Gary Zhexi Zhang, METAMERS, 2024
Commissioned and produced in the framework of EPFL-CDH Artist in Residence Program 2023, Enter the Hyper-Scientific
Partners: Prof. Michael Herzog, EPFL Laboratory of Psychophysics