20F (Simultaneity) is a multimedia installation that explores perception, elemental transformation, and the architecture of experience. The work reflects over a decade of collaboration between Raphaele Shirley and Algis Kizys, grounded in a shared interest in cosmology, quantum physics, and primal creation. What began as a live performance has since evolved into a multifaceted installation, merging light, sound, and image to probe the nature of reality and the visible and invisible structures that shape it.

 Originally developed during the 2020 lockdown in a freezing barn in upstate New York, the project takes its title from the 20°F temperatures under which it was conceived. Light, mirrors, sound, and space form the elemental tools of the piece. Shirley manipulates beams of light through 5-foot parabolic mirrors to reflect and refract beams into shifting color fields and spatial geometries. The mirrors serve as instruments of distortion and immersion, transforming the environment into a dynamic field of resonance and reflection. Kizys overlays and interlocks fragments of effected and manipulated original compositions, sound elements and field recordings to activate the space sonically. Together, he and Shirley envelop the visitor in their sensory landscape which hovers like a hallucination between the physical and the metaphysical. 

The project’s improvisational roots remain central to its character. Each iteration of the installation is uniquely attuned to the conditions of its site; its scale, layout, acoustics, and ambient atmosphere. Rather than imposing a fixed structure, the artists allow the piece to evolve in response to its surroundings, emphasizing a state of continuous reconfiguration.

As the work expanded, it incorporated a cinematic counterpart through a collaboration with visual artist and cinematographer Michael Lisnet. Employing bodycams, aerial drones, and 360-degree perspectives, Lisnet captured footage of mirrored light in snow-covered landscapes, translating the piece into a parallel visual language. Often filmed in subzero conditions, these outdoor sequences transform the terrain into a mutable surface, echoing the installation’s themes of distortion, inversion, and elemental transformation.

20F (Simultaneity) unfolds across two modes of experience—the live and the mediated—each occurring concurrently yet registering uniquely, bonding the temporal and the spatial. This bifurcated structure is central to the concept of “simultaneity,” highlighting the coexistence of immediate physical presence and the recorded, the way in which we encounter and interpret the world. In bridging the ephemeral and the constructed, the installation offers a contemplative space where the divine electromagnetic simplicities of light and sound intersect to reveal the deeper, hidden patterns of unification.

20F is produced in collaboration with the Donghwa Cultural Foundation and supported by Wave Farm Media Arts.