colors and light reconnect communities in marius troy’s imagined landscape installations

Marius troy generates tranquil imagined art installations

There’s an atmospheric air surrounding the images of imagined installations that Marius Troy generates on Midjourney, from the canopy of fabrics in gradients of colors, suspended over a platform where a handful of figures stand waiting, to the visible communities naturally drawn to the sculptural works. For the Norwegian artist and creative guide, who has spent more than twenty years at the intersection of art, technology, his speculative and imagined art installations put out a soul, one that lives and breathes, even so subtly and as an underlying theme.

These installations are realized, as Marius Troy generates them using AI image tools, mainly Midjourney. The process is visible and the output is visual, but the experience feels physical. He has described the way he creates, and that is through the feeling of already being there, vibrating on that frequency. To put it simply, the artist and creative is mapping out the inner states and our body’s consciousness and translating them visually.

marius troy imagined installations
Polychrome | all images courtesy of Marius Troy

Artworks as response to human disconnections

The artist and creative has built platforms, led large-scale installations, worked with Dior, Nike, and Oakley and has lived in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, and Oslo. He has also taught at art schools for nearly a decade, and coaches over a hundred creatives through the specific set of conditions that define the contemporary working life: disconnection, decision paralysis, pace that can’t be sustained. He knows these conditions from the inside, he says, and his practice, including the imagined installations he has been releasing through his Midjourney Sessions series, is a direct response to them, as seen even in Polychrome.

In this imagined art installation, Marius Troy designs a vast canopy of fabric in horizontal bands of color – violet at the outer edges, moving through deep red, through coral, through orange, through yellow, to near-white at the center – and these fabric-like structure is suspended from the roof of a spacious building, either a museum hall or a transit platform, and lit from within or below so the floor becomes a mirror and the color doubles downward. The people beneath the sculptural walk languidly walk, perhaps choosing to enjoy the atmosphere instead of rushing.

marius troy imagined installations
there’s an atmospheric air surrounding the images Marius Troy generates on Midjourney

Shelters that gather communities at once

There’s another imagined art installation by Marius Troy, and it’s called Elementi. Somehow, it shares the similar design from Polychrome, which is the use of the underground. Here, the floor is sand, and the light is the warm amber of earth-filtered sun. At the center of the space, a circular structure of floor-to-ceiling fabric encircles an oval of light, the shape of a moon or a sun, seen from below, hanging or perhaps drawn down from above. Footprints cross the sand in every direction. When the crowd is shown, they stand where all the fabric converges upward into a single file, the way cloth radiates from the center of a billowing parachute. The artist describes Elementi as an installation that brings the elements into a vast indoor space to calm the nervous system and invite reflection, exploration, and connection, evoking stillness in both the environment and the people within it.

The installation called Soft places a luminous hemisphere inside a Beaux-Arts hall, which resembles the Grand Palais, or an equivalent, over a rectangular pool of water. The dome of fabric hangs from the ceiling and curves downward, stopping just above the water’s surface, and the reflected light ripples across the pool and climbs the stone columns on both sides. People sit on the edge of the pool, silhouetted, facing the light, while others stand at a distance. Marius Troy describes Soft as a contemplation of softness in space and atmospheres, an exploration of what happens physiologically when we occupy a space that doesn’t have weight and friction, metaphorically hinting that while the hemisphere is large, it isn’t heavy; that it glows rather than shines.

marius troy imagined installations
these installations are realized, as Marius Troy generates them using AI image tools

L’Abri Doux, French for the soft shelter, comes next, showing fabric architecture that becomes landscape. In one view, a cylindrical column of vertical threads or fine cords drops from a circular aperture in a vaulted ceiling, lit from within so the threads glow and the base of the column spreads onto a sand floor, where two figures sit in silhouette. In another view, the space is vast, a fabric structure so large it reads as a building, with a rounded arched opening at the center where amber light comes through and dozens of figures sit or lie on the sand floor in small groups. The title names what the space does because it shelters the community it houses, softly and gently.

Entre Deux, or between two, places a sphere the size of a building between the columns of the Panthéon in Paris, suspended at portal height, lit from within so it glows salmon pink as the city sky behind it fades at dusk. Below it, the crowd gathers. Nobody is passing through, as everyone has stopped. In the second image in this series, the scale drops, where a stone arch on the banks of the Seine frames a small interior: fabric draped from the arch, a pendant lamp at the center, six or seven people sitting on cushioned seating at the base. The Seine is visible through the arch opening, alluding to a room without walls, a shelter without a building, a fire without a fire.

marius troy imagined installations
the artist has described the way he creates, and that is through the feeling of already being there

What connects these imagined art installations is the same ethos that Marium Troy has been trying to say in every format his career has taken. The systems people live inside, whether that’s the pace, the noise, or the constant digital weather, produce a kind of damage: disconnection from the body, from other people, from the simple fact of being in a room with other humans and nowhere particular to be. His imagined installations are not proposals for public art programs, but he hopes they demonstrate a condition that already exists, just expressed in the language of fabric, light, colors, and a bit of sand, gathering people altogether within speculative tranquil shelters.

marius troy imagined installations
view of Elementi