The Figure That Walks Toward You: Universal Everything and the Body on the Screen

Across an enormous screen, a single figure comes walking. There is nothing behind it. No line of ground, no sky, no street. Over a levelled field of light, one form advances toward you at a steady pace, and each time it draws nearer the material of its body is exchanged — fur, a frothing liquid, twisted wood, crystal, each in turn sheathing it and sloughing away. No end arrives. The walk goes on forever. It never leaves the screen, and it never reaches a destination. Only a single body, walking and going on changing, is there on the blank surface.

This is the scene of Transfiguration, the signature work of Universal Everything, a digital art studio in Sheffield, England. This essay is an attempt to read the subject that runs consistently through their work — a single body walking across the screen — as a question about surfaces, about signage and large displays. When what flows across a surface is not a vortex of data but a gesture like that of a living thing, how does the city's screen change?

Technology with a Soul in It

Universal Everything was founded in Sheffield in 2004 by Matt Pyke. 3D animation, touchscreens, motion capture, large-scale video displays, complex sound design — the range of media they handle is wide, but there is one consistent orientation in what they make. Pyke calls it technology with a soul in it, as distinct from abstract motion graphics.

It's not just abstract — a moving image or abstract technology — it's technology that has a soul in it.

— It's Nice That — Matt Pykesource

These words are bound up with why the studio's work is so widely received. In Pyke's account, if the person, the people, the crowd can be seen in the work, then any passer-by, with no specialist knowledge, can perceive the humanity in it. Not a display of technology, but the recovery through technology of the feel of a body and of life — that attitude is what separates their screens from other generative moving-image practice.

Here is a clear point of divergence from the lineage of "data flowing across a surface" that this journal has treated so far. If pouring vast datasets onto an architectural skin and visualising them as an outline-less fluid (Making Architecture Dream: Refik Anadol and the Data-Painted Facade) is an expression of the "plane," of a surface uniformly filled, then what Universal Everything places on the screen is usually a single body — or a countable number of them. Not a plane but a point. Not a flow but a walk.

Architecture That Walks

The subject first took strong outline in 2014, with Walking City. It is a moving-image work in which a single building, generated with the CGI software used for Hollywood visual effects and physics simulation, walks slowly across the screen. With every step, the building changes shape. Into a biological curved surface, into a geometric lattice, into an undulating organism — endlessly transforming, and yet still remaining one piece of "walking architecture."

The title and the source of the idea lie in the utopia of the same name conceived by the 1960s architecture collective Archigram: Walking City, a giant mobile metropolis. Legged, moving when the need arose, connecting to other cities and detaching again — half a century later, Universal Everything revived that unrealised image of the future as a single sculpture walking across a computer. The work won the Golden Nica, the top prize in the Computer Animation/VFX category, at Prix Ars Electronica 2014.

What matters is that this is called a "video sculpture." Rather than a looping clip of fixed duration, it is designed as a state of unceasing transformation. Whenever a viewer stands in front of the screen, the same instant never comes twice. Architecture stops being a fixed container and becomes a living thing that walks and goes on changing — in this one point, almost all of the studio's later work was already in embryo.

The Screen That Looks Back

The walking body begins to enter into a relation with the person watching in Future You, from 2019. It is an interactive motion-capture work commissioned for "AI: More than Human" (16 May – 26 August 2019), the exhibition organised by the Barbican Centre in London.

When no one is standing in front of the screen, it is no more than a primitive form. But when a person steps up and moves, the form inside the screen reads that movement and learns from it, evolving by degrees into a more refined body — more agile, more finely made, a "future you," as it were. The more you move, the stranger and more stimulating the response inside the screen becomes. There are 47,000 possible forms, and no two people meet the same "future self." The exhibition was among the most successful in the Barbican's history, drawing more than 88,000 visitors.

Here the screen is inverted, from an object to be shown into a subject that looks back and answers. It mirrors movement, and yet, unlike a mirror, that body "grows" with the viewer's movement as its material. A single body standing on a surface faces the body of the viewer one to one — given how often large displays are used as one-directional devices for posting, this is also a re-examination of how the surface called a screen is used at all.

The One Who Walks Forever

And so back to the opening. The purest crystallisation of the studio's subject of the walking body is Transfiguration. Its prototype, The Transfiguration, was presented in 2011 at "Super-Computer Romantics," the studio's first large-scale solo exhibition, held at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. In 2020, a remade version, Transfiguration, was released.

Inside the screen there is only a single body. It walks on at a steady pace over the blank, and with every step the material covering the whole of it is exchanged. A body sheathed in fur becomes, the next moment, a frothing liquid, then wood grain, then crystal, then something else. There is no background. There is no story. Only the walking and the metamorphosis, continuing without end.

What this work shows is Universal Everything's screen at its highest purity. On the surface there is no crowd, no vortex of data, no explanatory text. A single body alone crosses a blank field. It is neither abstract nor figurative: it is the appearance of a "something" with the feel of a living creature, simply passing through.

A Single Point Standing on the Surface

Re-order Universal Everything's work from the viewpoint of the city's screens and one subject rises up: they have staked themselves on standing "a single body" upon the surface called a screen. The walking architecture, the future you, the endlessly transfiguring walker — what they share is that each is not a flow filling a plane uniformly but a countable presence rising against a blank.

It is worth recalling tenkei, the point of scenery in ink-wash painting. Just as a small figure or boat brushed into a vast landscape gives scale and meaning to the whole view, a single body crossing a blank screen kindles on that surface one point that says: there is life here. Where a large display in the city is apt to become a plane that goes on pushing information in one direction, Universal Everything's screens raise up a relation — something with the same bodily presence as the viewer is walking there.

For this body to stand, the blank of the background is required. The levelled field that makes the walking possible, the margin with nothing drawn on it — that can be read as ma (間), the interval. Rather than filling the plane, first open a blank. In the place thus opened, a single body stands as a point and begins to walk. Ma prepares the vessel, and on it a body dwells as tenkei. Universal Everything's screens are the place where these two movements happen at once.

The studio's work reaches widely, into museums and galleries and into commercial commissions alike. The moving identity for the London 2012 Olympics, Mobius Loop installed in Hyundai's Vision Hall, the brand identity for MTV rolled out across 62 channels worldwide — moving lightly back and forth between exhibition and commerce, they have carried the same "feel of a body" onto every screen. What do you stand up on a surface? A flow, or a single walking body? What Universal Everything has gone on choosing is always the latter.

In the morning, when you happen to glance at a large display in an empty street, a single body comes walking across it — for the sake of that small encounter, they go on keeping the margin of the screen open.

Sources

1. fig.001Walking City — Universal Everything
2. fig.002Future You — Universal Everything
3. fig.003Transfiguration (2020) — Universal Everything
4. [4]Universal Everything — Wikipedia
5. [5]“Technology with a soul in it”: A chat with Universal Everything founder Matt Pyke — It’s Nice That
6. [6]AI: More than Human — Barbican
7. [7]Walking City, da Archigram a Universal Everything. Il video vincitore di Ars Electronica 2014 — Artribune