Future Shock: Hamill Industries

A look inside Hamill Industries’ Vortex, an installation showing now at Future Shock featuring a soundtrack by Floating Points.

Devised and engineered by Barcelona creative studio Hamill Industries and soundtracked by an original score from Floating Points, Vortex is an interactive light, smoke and sound installation that generates a series of smoke rings, suspending our sense of disbelief and disconnecting us from our surroundings by visualising how music travels through air.

Currently installed at Fact and 180 Studios’ new exhibition Future Shock, Vortex is one of the last pieces encountered as you traverse the subterranean spaces underneath London’s 180 The Strand. Originally conceived for the 2016 edition of Barcelona’s digital arts festival, MIRA, the installation reacts to sound and generates an increasingly complex sequence of light patterns.

“We really wanted to work with smoke and haze as a possibility of making invisible forces visible,” says Hamill Industries’ Anna Diaz, who works alongside her creative partner Pablo Barquín. “We were trying to think about an installation that would be able to reproduce, or at least give a sense of how music can travel trough space.”

In this film, Fact talks to Diaz about the genesis of the piece and how it was inspired by Barquín’s interest in fluid dynamics. Diaz also explains the experiential ethos of Hamill Industries, whose videos and installations – including their frequent collaborations with Floating Points – aim to add an immersive tangibility to audiovisual art.

Vortex is showing now at Future Shock, at 180 the Strand, London. Future Shock runs until 28 August, 2022. For tickets and information on opening times, visit the 180 The Strand website.