BD 2025 installation to demonstrate Big Bang is "still banging"
A new immersive installation at the National Science and Media Museum is set to open.
The installation, called YOU:MATTER, has been created by artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast and will be open to the public from Thursday, April 3, 2025, until Sunday, February 22, 2026.
The installation, commissioned for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, will take visitors on a journey to discover their connection to the universe.
YOU:MATTER will show how everything in the universe can be traced back to the same cosmic explosion, and how the Big Bang is "still banging" right at the heart of Bradford.
The installation will show how each ingredient of life is constructed from the same building blocks as the universe, and how the human body is inextricably linked to water, air, and sunlight.
The installation, commissioned for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, will showcase how everything in the universe can be traced back to the Big Bang, and will remain open until Sunday, February 22, 2026 (Image: Supplied)
These ideas will be brought to life through a series of immersive sound and video installations, revealing the deep connections between our bodies, the planet, and the wider universe.
Visitors will be able to shift perspectives, from witnessing the Earth breathing through data from NASA, to following the journey of a single drop of water.
Interactive installations will invite audiences to breathe life into a digital forest, while a selfie station will place them within the vast web of biodiversity.
Marshmallow Laser Feast work across the boundaries of art, immersive experiences, XR, and film, with their work described as "taking] people on multisensory journeys where imagination and information collide."
They have exhibited internationally at institutions ranging from ACMI and the Barbican Centre to YCAM and DDB Seoul, as well as Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Saatchi Gallery, and the Lisbon Architectural Triennale.
Shanaz Gulzar, creative director at Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, said: "We're pleased to be collaborating with the National Science and Media Museum and Marshmallow Laser Feast on this exciting and thought-provoking installation that invites audiences to discover the profound connections between the universe and everyday life.
"Through immersive technology and Marshmallow Laser Feast's innovative thinking, YOU:MATTER is the story of Bradford's people and their place in the cosmos."
Robin McNicholas, co-founder and creative director at Marshmallow Laser Feast, said: "We want visitors to feel their connection to the past, present, and future—not just as individuals, but as part of an ongoing story that stretches across time and space.
"YOU:MATTER is a reminder that you are not separate from the cosmos, but an extension of its story."
More information and tickets are available at https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/whats-on/you-matter
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Tortured, decapitated, castrated victims ringed in barbed wire; prostitutes suffering the affections of grinning, obese officers; grieving peasants wailing, hunched over dead children. While his World War II work is clearly reportage, here he goes beyond what he actually witnessed, imagining scenes in harrowing detail. His art pivots from stylized to surreal; if his early pieces had echoes of Edward Hopper, they now seem haunted by Hieronymus Bosch. Mitchell's anti-war crusade had real-life impacts, including delaying his tenure at the University of Maryland. Institutions which had once welcomed him back as a returning war hero refused to acknowledge his incendiary new body of work. In an unpublished article titled 'Das Kannibal,' Mitchell wrote angrily about being blackballed for speaking out against the war. The Defense Department, which had first invited him to Vietnam, declined to show 'The Plague' drawings, he said, suggesting that perhaps they could be exhibited in '50 years time' when they would be less controversial. The Smithsonian, too, turned their back on him (a cutting blow for an artist who'd lived in the D.C. area his whole life) because (Mitchell wrote) they were 'intimidated by celebrities like [Alexander] Calder' who threatened to withhold gifts of his art if they circulated an exhibit on the war. In a scathing rejection of his newest work, Bernard Quint, art director at Life magazine, wrote on Nov. 28, 1967, 'From looking at your drawings, I would gather that only American G.I.'s are guilty of poking their daggers into Christ-like Vietnamese and obviously Hanoi and the Viet Cong are blank pieces of paper which symbolize innocence.' The doors that were once opened to Mitchell now slammed shut, and he felt profoundly betrayed. 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Just over 20 years after the end of his World War II service, he returns to the battlefield and finds another formerly peaceful country overtaken by war. It is all too familiar, but now he is 20 years older, a reporter and not a soldier, his vision no longer clouded by the communal spirit of war. Standing apart from the machine, he sees it for what it truly is. Camus' The Plague is set in Oran, and with this connection in mind he christens his new series of unflinching depictions of massacre. This time, he seems to be saying, I will tell the truth about war, all the wars I have seen and all the wars to come. But how much of this was already brewing before Mitchell stepped foot in Indochina? In his 1976 eulogy at Mitchell's funeral, Lt. Cmdr. J. Burke Wilkinson described how Mitchell's art evolved during World War II: I heard he had gone to the Pacific … and we saw in Life his Iwo Jima pictures … the growing depth and compassion of his art … the terror and the beauty too … a sadder, harsher note, colors more disturbing … a sense of strain, exhaustion even …Later we heard he had been ordered home by the Head of the Art Unit and had begged to be allowed to stay. As a military man, Wilkinson would have known that 'strain' and 'exhaustion' could be signs of serious mental health deterioration. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder was not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980; before that it was known simply as combat or battle 'fatigue.' There's also evidence that the profusion of bodies and nightmarish scenes that characterize Mitchell's later work started to creep in before he went to Vietnam. The catalog for Mitchell's posthumous Corcoran show in 1979 notes that a group of dream-influenced paintings, including one called Fragments From the Apocalypse, were exhibited before he visited Vietnam, and closely resemble his painting The Saigon Follies, 'with its melange of grotesque images.' In going through the art in Craig's house, I've also come across pieces in the same surreal style that predate his Vietnam experience. It leads me to wonder: How long had Mitchell been suffering? Had he ever gotten help? I'm left with the uneasy sense that both my great-uncle's life and death have been misunderstood. We know that he'd witnessed countless losses in World War II, saw wounded men dying in agony, traveled the world to participate in some of the bloodiest battles history has ever seen. And his official duty was to bring this brutality to life on paper. While other men had terrible jobs, they also had the possibility of forgetting, putting the war behind them after their task was done. But Mitchell's charge was ongoing: to capture the slaughter in his mind's eye, to witness and remember and translate everything he had seen for the broader public. Once these images were seared into his memory, they tormented him and they emerged in his imagination, his dreams, his art. He could never forget. Could it be that Vietnam was the trigger, not the cause, of his self-inflicted demise? In 1964 Mitchell had an exhibition at the University of Maryland of work from World War II called 'On War: Drawings from the Arena,' pulled from his personal collection. On the postcard promoting the show, he quoted James Joyce's Ulysses, 'History is the Nightmare from which I am trying to Awaken.' Below he added this text to justify displaying his wartime artwork, these 'odds and ends of catastrophe found in history's wake': If it is asked why this assemblage of faces from a dusty picture, burning villages and cities, refugees and invasion armadas … should be presented at this time, one can only reply that for so many of us the longest day in history dawned, cheerless and cold, off the coast of Normandy twenty years ago. Mitchell survived that 'longest day' in body, but the damage to his spirit would only become evident two decades later in another land ravaged by a new American war. At such close range, sketchbook in hand, the repeating cycles of history proved too much to bear. In the last, he must have felt his only chance to awaken from the nightmare was to end the dream.
