In order to explore this eternal formation of universes interconnected to one another through a mother-child relationship, we decided to create a work based on various representations of different moments in the story of a universe. The role of the “creator” belongs to the software, an application developed in openFrameworks that manages the generation of the various scenes that are displayed and that interacts with Ableton Live and Max/MSP for the production of the soundtrack through a generative sound system. Each cycle of Multiverse lasts 30 minutes: being a real-time piece, many details change and happen continuously in a different form, while at the same time retaining some information from the previous cycle. This wants to act as a metaphor for the hypothetical Cosmological Natural Selection by Smolin: each newly-born universe could include some slight modifications compared to its parent universe, potentially leading to an evolutionary process where universes with favourable conditions are more likely to continue their reproduction, while others eventually become extinct.

During the conception process, we have been particularly lucky to visit the CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva (CH). In particular, we have been inspired by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Consisting of a 27-kilometer-long ring structure, it was created to accelerate particle beams at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. This has inspired the sound design for the project: accompanying all 30 minutes of the experience, the sound of the piece has been developed starting from the recording of glass marbles colliding with one another and with various objects. Later, the recordings were edited through audio manipulation and assembled in a real soundtrack alternating hushed, muffled tones with intensely piercing and sharp notes.

Visually, each digital scene represents a stage in the evolutionary path of a multiverse, evolving according to a series of key passages theorized by Smolin. We began with the idea that the gravitational collapse of matter does not end in a singularity of a black hole but gives life to a so-called child universe. While the physical laws of the simulation remain the same each time these events occur, there are minimal random changes in the values of the parameters of these laws during the bounce, leading to the origin of a new universe with slight differences in its fundamental properties.

The particle simulations shown to the viewer are created within a specially designed simulated environment, allowing experimentation with different motion rules and a digital setting. The particles interact with each other and the surrounding space, altering the perceived information by modifying a vector field that stores the values within a voxel space. This strategy involves extensive use of shader programs that maximize hardware performance and optimize the graphics pipeline on the GPU.