Want to know what happens in ACMI’s playful new show? It’s up to you

Matt Pyke started his digital design collective in 2004, the same year Facebook was born. Back then, Universal Everything consisted of him and a computer in his garden shed in Sheffield. Animation software was his passion, but even he could not have anticipated the visions, tricks and tomfoolery that technology would make possible over the next 20 years.

Back then, the big challenge for the movie industry’s backroom nerds was to find a way to do convincing CGI fur. How far we have moved since then is made clear in Beings, Universal Everything’s show of 13 animations opening at ACMI this month. Fur – extravagant, outrageous fur – is everywhere, but fur is just a starting point.

A piece called Kinfolk, for example, consists of a large interactive screen in which viewers morph into fantastically furred and plumed avatars that are not only convincing, but change appearance every time their corresponding humans move. The programming is so complex that no furred, feathered or scaled creature is ever repeated; the combinations of variables is virtually endless.

“It’s just a very playful, joyful piece,” says Pyke. “And very much about exploring how you move your body. You can also interact with the visitors next to you. Slosh each other with your fur, things like that. I just like the idea of people changing their identity like that and how it might change their real behaviour when they see their reflection as it is.”

Migrations, the next piece he shows me, is an infinite parade of imaginary beasts, their movements grounded in the skeletal workings of real animals but their skin and gait – one furry ball seems to roll past – are out of this world. In Symbiosis, viewers see themselves on screen as drops of water, coalescing with other drops if they move closer to other people.

And in Transfiguration, a human figure transforms over the course of a brisk walk, morphing from watery to waxy, rocky to leafy.

“Every time there’s a new technology that emerges and starts to disrupt things, for us, that’s another opportunity to create things that have never been done before,” Pyke says. “It’s like: how far can you push this?”

The name Universal Everything was originally a sort of joke. “I just sat there thinking what’s the biggest possible way to represent me in a bedroom studio? Universal Everything was like the most all-encompassing word.” These days, it isn’t so far off the mark: there are around 10 people in the core collective, who are in touch every day, but the team on a big project might run to 60.

“I started on my own and tried to design everything on my own, then I reached the limit of my skills and thought ‘oh dear, I need some help here’ – because I was foolish enough not to say no to projects and then I’d think ‘who am I going to call?’,” says Pyke.

At least working entirely online, which was very unusual when he started, meant he could approach experts anywhere in the world. “So we’ve worked with computer programmers in Japan, and we’ve worked with people on the west coast of the US. One animator lived in a city in Siberia ... quite a few people in Korea. I love that.”

His own knowledge of the cutting-edge technology they use is vague. As creative director, his ideas often start on the back of a napkin. “I intentionally stay as naive as possible,” he says. “I’m aware through conversations and watching people work where the limits are and where the potential is. And I’m always learning about emergent technology, but I don’t use it myself. I don’t know how to use visual effects software; I don’t know how to program; I’m very much about ideas and sketches.

“That was partially me realising I was never going to become a great computer programmer, as much as I tried, and thinking let’s just collaborate with experts instead ... I’ll do this sketch of a very simple concept and share it with someone who can then create a prototype of that. When I see it in a few weeks’ time, I am getting a first impression almost like a punter would, so I’m responding to it fresh.”

Pyke has no more idea than anyone else what the costume-changing program will deliver, knowing only that – in accordance with the original instructions – it will be different every time. Once it is programmed, the algorithm is in control.

“I think that’s what’s interesting. You press ‘go’ on the software and out come infinite iterations. Each one surprises us, as the designers. We’re essentially designing the rules and then it generates its own things. We often don’t know what’s going to be in the show.”

This certainly raises interesting questions about creativity and authorship. “I think [there is] this question of ‘who is the designer now?‘,” Pyke agrees. “Does technology design its own content, which then seduces us humans?” He describes himself in the company blurb as “future-positive”, meaning that he is of the school that believes technology will solve issues such as climate change. He’s for it. At the same time, he admits that AI threatens humans’ jobs, including his own.

“But we’re all very much coming from a craft perspective, where it’s all about carefully crafted materials and colours, form and movement that hopefully, at the moment, has the edge on AI-generated work,” he says. “As artists and designers, we like making things that are hard. Making acceptable, average things with AI is too easy. I imagine the artistic community will gravitate towards finding edge cases [problems occurring at the extremes] outside the generic things that AI is making and maybe do more human things. Physical things.”

Pyke says he doesn’t have a favourite past project; he is always most enthusiastic about the next thing. Right now, that is a collaboration with a London surgeon to develop a diagnostic tool that allows patients to visually convey their sensations of pain.

“She got in touch with us after she’d seen Transfiguration ... She saw the link between that and pain visualisation,” says Pyke. “I love that idea, of repurposing these artistic and craft skills we have into something that will have a benefit to everyday people. It’s a prototype, but it feels like it joins all the dots between what we’re interested in. We’ll see.”

Beings is at ACMI, May 22 – September 29. Stephanie Bunbury travelled to Sheffield with the assistance of ACMI.