Universal Everything — the studio founded by Matt Pyke, known for its parades of endlessly evolving procedural figures — opened a major new large-scale installation this summer. The work continues the studio’s signature: crowds of synthetic “beings,” each generated and animated by code rather than hand-keyframed, marching, morphing, and shape-shifting across monumental screens in motion that never quite repeats. Where much of this site’s interactive-art coverage centers on light, data, or physical space, Universal Everything works primarily in generative moving image — figures born from algorithms, given uncanny life at architectural scale.
Watch: Universal Everything by Matt Pyke (YouTube)
Beings made of code
The studio’s enduring idea is the digital being as a generative system: not a character animated frame by frame, but a form defined by rules for how it moves, grows, and transforms, so it produces an endless stream of never-identical motion. A single walking figure becomes a study in emergent behavior; a crowd of them becomes a hypnotic, evolving mass. That procedural approach — author the system, let it generate the performance — is the same generative-art principle this site tracks in code and installations alike, here applied to synthetic bodies and rendered with a distinctive, materially rich visual style that has made the studio’s work instantly recognizable.
Scale and spectacle in service of wonder
Universal Everything’s installations lean into spectacle, but the spectacle serves a genuine sense of wonder at artificial life and motion. Blown up to fill a wall, a procedural being’s endless transformation becomes mesmerizing and slightly uncanny — familiar enough to read as a body, strange enough to remind you it’s generated. It’s a more maximalist, screen-based counterpoint to the austere light work of UVA or the data severity of Ryoji Ikeda elsewhere on this beat, proof that the generative-installation form spans the minimal and the exuberant. The new work extends the studio’s long inquiry into what it feels like to watch something alive that was never born.