Boris Acket Brings His Melancholic Machine “Einder” on Tour with Fred Again

Exactly one year ago, an email landed in the inbox of the Dutch artist Boris Acket. It was from Lucy Hickling—the creative director of the music multi-hyphenate Frederick John Philip Gibson, known as Fred Again—stating they were interested in his artwork and wanted to meet. Two weeks and a studio visit later, a quietly ambitious plan was in motion to create a special atmosphere for Fred Again’s worldwide USB002 tour.

What emerged is an adapted version of Acket’s Einder—a monumental, responsive installation suspended above the dance floor. A living system shaped as much by air, heat, and gravity as by human presence and innovation itself. Unlike the earlier iterations—designed for one space, installed once, and experienced in relative stasis—this version for the tour is nomadic. It travels from city to city, venue to venue, undergoing constant installation and deinstallation, recalibrated each time to new architectural conditions, safety regulations, and climates.

Over the course of the tour, the work will have been hoisted, folded, compressed, and released more than twenty times, demanding an engineering precision typically reserved for infrastructure rather than art. Yet for all its technical rigor, the piece resists fixed form. It responds in real time to temperature, humidity, and the collective heat of thousands of bodies gathered beneath it—sometimes behaving as expected, sometimes refusing to.

At its core, Einder is a fabric-based machine animated by air and gravity, one that asks its audience to surrender control alongside its maker. In cold rooms, the fabric descends heavily, emphasizing weight and fall; in warmer spaces, it lifts, clings, and billows, shaped by thermic currents generated by the crowd itself. Throughout the tour, this dynamic transformed from a logistical challenge into a poetic instrument, turning human presence into an active force within the artwork. Each city leaves an imprint—not visually archived, but physically felt.

Acket has described his work as a kind of memory machine that’s less about representing nature or the human condition than reflecting how we perceive it. Suspended above Fred Again’s performances, Einder becomes a communal threshold: a surface that splits space, slows time, and invites introspection within a collective ritual. Its title, drawn from an archaic Dutch word meaning “the border between heaven and earth,” gestures toward this liminal quality—the sense of standing beneath something infinite, unfinished, and perpetually becoming.

As Einder appears around the world, it was a dream of Acket’s and Fred’s to give it a time and place to be experienced outside the charged temporality of a concert. For this, Fred Again and Acket worked with material from “Secret Life,” the ambient album of Brian Eno and Fred Again. Set to this soundtrack, Einder will appear for people to gather under, enjoy thoughts and memories, and reflect. Tomorrow in New York, for one day only, it will do just that as a timed exhibition. Guests are encouraged to buy a ticket, arrive open-minded, and enjoy the visual wave that washes over them.

From Zero Bond in New York today, Acket shared with Whitewall how Einder evolved from a technically precise system into what he calls a “hyper-melancholic machine,” capable of holding intimacy and scale, control, and surrender. As it moves through the world—responding to bodies, weather, music, and memory—the work reveals itself not as a backdrop to performance, but as a participant: breathing, shifting, and quietly asking what it means to feel together, now.

Explore Boris Acket’s “Einder”

WHITEWALL: You’ve worked at the intersection of innovation and human nature for years, but this installation for Fred’s tour seems special. How did you two meet? 

BORIS ACKET: I met Fred through Lucy, who is the creative director of Fred. She’s a very special character. What I really liked about this process in general is that it feels like everyone sort of became friends. It became this very personal project, which I didn’t expect from the get-go. It started with a one-sentence email ofromf Lucy saying, “Hey, we like your work. Should we meet?” One week later, she was in Amsterdam with Josh from Fred’s team, too. What I found really different than with other artists’ requests is that it was very personal. Instead of  going through the management first, it was basically Lucy and Fred first, and then management after a few months—after they said, “Yes, we’re going to do this.” 

Normally, I would exhibit somewhere for four months, and we have one build and one break—and everything is about the perfection of this one space. But with this process, we basically spent 18 months on a four-month project, a four-month tour, but with 20 installs and load-outs. 

I’m used to working in a lot of detail in one space and emphasizing the conceptual arc. With this process, that was also important, but it was also very fun, and it was interesting to be so involved in the engineering part—getting it to fit into all these 20 venues. Together with Brandon, who’s this amazing stage manager, we were creating a symphony of getting this in and out. It was basically, “How do you get this gigantic 20-by-60-meter fabric to float and to go back into a case?” It was a very different process.

WW: This piece stems from an iteration you created in 2020. How long have you been creating the scenography for this tour?

BA: Exactly one year ago, we started, and then the tour started in October. 

WW: So, you had 10 months to figure out the artwork’s logistics?

BA: We typically exhibit this work in a museum or institutional context. For this tour however, we had to run all these safety regulations because we go over multiple continents, into multiple countries; so we needed a motor that is certified in all these countries.

This is a bit technical, but I do like it. There are 1200-square-meters of air that you have to move up as a certain weight, so you need an engine that is certified only for a very light fabric, but that can carry this immense structure of air up and down. In the end, we decided to build our own engines together with this Denmark company, Wahlberg, which was very interesting, with all these specifications to carry fabric. 

WW: I love how you’re describing air as a material.

BA: Yeah, and gravity, as well. We did a residency in Amsterdam at a museum, in 2020, during Coronavirus times, and we started off with this version that goes from the front to the back. Basically, very simple machines, just carrying a curtain-style fabric from the front to the back. We were standing next to it and these machines had a two-and-a-half million accuracy rate in two meters, so it’s super, super accurate. And this fabric would move back and forth, mainly with a simple motion, and you see the same happening every time, but slightly different. It’s a beautiful thing happening, where no next wave will be exactly the same as the last. 

You have total control over the engine, but you have to surrender to the material underneath it. Over the course of developing these works, for example, we now have an exhibition in Schiedam in Holland, which is a lot about our relationship to nature. What I like about these works specifically is that when you come into a space, you clearly see what is happening. It’s fabric going up and down. It’s very honest. There’s not much we keep from you. But still, you can get lost in it, like you can get lost in a stream of water. It’s also very clear what is happening. Water is using gravity to go down, and it’s an interplay of light, gravity, and motion, but you can look at it forever. And that’s what I like with fabric, specifically with these interventions.

I have this big fascination for time philosophy and the now. And what I like about Henri Bergson’s work, and his durational theories, is that he makes very clear with a super simple theory that without memory projecting into the now, and expectation projecting into the now, you can never see water in a fabric. You need a human “now” perspective to be able to say, “This looks like a storm” or “This looks like water.” 

We did one in Berlin, where we made this super subjective weather system, in which you have three storm cells coming into a building and traveling out of it, and it’s this super scientific but very subjective computer system that is simulating a weather system that has nothing to do with a weather system. We went through extreme lengths to make it realistic. People come into this building, and they voluntarily lie underneath this storm for one and a half hours, and they tell me, “I’ve never felt so much in a storm before.” This is very strange and interesting. And dystopic, right?  These pieces are not just beautiful, but they’re tools. 

Eight or nine years ago, when I started these pieces, I thought the pieces were about water or the storm, but they’re actually much more about us and how we perceive them. It’s more a mirror than it is a subject.

Creating a Space for Communal Ritual

WW: How does this exhibition in Brooklyn speak to a theory like that? Or what’s different about this one for Fred’s tour?

BA: People don’t go into the space thinking about all these things. They don’t go in and they are not thinking, “I’m seeing a storm. It’s because I’m human. It’s because I experienced it like this, so let me think about that, and then let me think about if this is actually dystopic or beautiful. Let me think about that when I’m going out again.”

You have these super unfiltered, very honest reactions to it, which is super beautiful. Fred also drags in a lot of different people. I’ve never had so many messages with a genuine heartfelt “Thank you for providing this space to be underneath.”

It became much more of a shared communal ritual space where people really felt together underneath something, which was the goal from the outside. I think what Fred liked about the piece is not the natural layer or the questions about how we experience the “now,” but more that it is a roof or a space within a space in which we come together and almost equalize it. By being underneath it together, you make everyone the same. 

I guess the difference is that sort of blunt honesty instead of having an art person touching the chin, standing in a museum, and saying, “Hey, what am I actually seeing?” It’s very unfiltered.

The space here has an energy and an emotion to it, but what I really took from this project is that by making a space breathe, or by making a space this alive, and also personal, the space speaks to the whole space, but it also speaks to you. You can be in a temporal high or low space, while someone else is in another. What I learned is that if you make a space in a space like we did, and if you make it breathe, it has a close emotional impact to someone underneath.

Temperature as Material for “Einder”

WW: It’s very cold in New York right now, and I remember from a previous Fred Again show that the energy can be quite high—and warm. How does an element like temperature impact the installation and help it move or change?  

BA: What we’ve done over the past year is let the fabric flow on the winch wire, which means that if the winch wire is 12 meters and you drop the winch wire, there is a weight at the end of the winch wire, and it can travel through the fabric through a ring. So, if you moved all the winches down at the same time, the fabric will fall and yse the air underneath it to fall until they hit the winch weights. 

At the Glasgow show, I said to Fred and the management team, “The only thing I’m worried about is the 15,000 people underneath it, and what it will do with the temperature—the thermic element.” We did a test in the rehearsal venue with heaters underneath it to try and create a thermic belt, but it didn’t happen, so we were like, “Okay, great. It’s a cold space. We’re going to be fine.” So, in Glasgow, the show started, and we already started seeing the fabric slowly going up, clinging to the top trusses. In the moment, it felt a little bit like Spinal Tap.

It was still so beautiful that it wasn’t, but for me personally, this whole installation is about the fabric flowing down by gravity—and the middle part just stayed up in a bell. Now I know that we have 84 winches and one kilo of weight on each wedge pressing this fabric down. And even with 84 kilos of weight, bodies are somewhat stronger than that, so the 84 kilos still needs time to press all this air down. It’s like pumping up a mattress.

The first show, it didn’t come down, so we changed the design. If you see the video of it in Brussels, you can see that the temperature of the people actually became part of the design. It’s like a cathedral because of the people’s heat. We now use the heat as an instrument.  What I found very poetic about it is that the piece always had this intrinsic quality of control and surrender, and now we’re having to surrender to specific room qualities and temperature —because we were also in Madrid and in Mexico, where it was much hotter with less body heat problems than in New York. Dublin was 11 degrees and then you have bodies of 37 creating a sauna of 45 and then 45 to 11 is such a big difference.

At the beginning of the tour, I said I really didn’t like this because I felt after the first show, we were breaking something that wasn’t broken. The installation without 15,000 people is very beautiful—and then people come and break it. [Laughs] In the end, now, it feels like a very wholesome project.

I didn’t really know Fred when he was contacting me. The only album I knew was the one he made with Brian Eno because I’m a big ambient head. It feels very full circle that tomorrow we can present the work with that album specifically.

“Secret Life” Meets “Einder”: An Art Exhibition Within a Music Tour

WW: Tomorrow, the installation will debut to the public—a one-day, timed ticketed experience for guests to come in, experience your artwork, and enjoy it at their leisure and not in a concert setting. Since this exhibition wasn’t planned ahead of time, how did it come to fruition?

BA: From the get-go, I told Fred and Lucy, “This is my dream—in some venue of the tour, maybe we have two or three weeks, and it feels like a residency, the full production is already in, and we can do this.” They really embraced this energy, for which I’m very grateful. That’s also really how we collaborated on this project—it was flowy. For the first show, for example, we didn’t really have a set plan. It was built largely on a lot of trust, and Fred already talked about doing an ambient morning after the show, for example. This didn’t happen, but then we started implementing these ambient moments at the end of the show—basically not doing a hard cut at the end of the show, but putting on ambient music and letting the installation continue.

This was happening on the “Secret Life” album already, from Brian Eno. I guess this sort of exhibition concept flowed out very organically—and even logistically and practically, the boring but also fun stuff is that we have a residency here, a three-week location, so we could actually find a date to do it. 

I’m super excited that we can finally do it in one day. I think tomorrow will be the only day ever that we will do it with this production, this music, this exact soundtrack that I’m going to mix this afternoon with Fred.

While it is a very durational thing that we’re doing tomorrow—from four to ten—it’s only there for one day, and then it’s gone. It has a beautiful juxtaposition of being very short and very long, at the same time.

WW: You’re mixing a new soundtrack today for tomorrow’s exhibition?

BA: Yes. Basically, Fred made a few location-specific versions of tracks from the album. He gave me the music, and I intuitively made an order that we’re going to finish this afternoon. I said to Fred, like, “To break the ambient, lush vibe, it would be interesting to have, every now and then, the harsher generative weather artwork pierce through before moving into the ambient lush again.” 

So, we have a generative storm every 30 minutes flowing through the building, and then we go into a part of “Secret Life” again. That’s what we’re mixing tonight.

Most people will leave after 45 minutes, so we’re trying to get the right ratio of people in that we need to be in to get to the break. We want around six to eight hundred people maximum, and every 30 minutes, the storms are generative—so they are slightly different every time, and in between we have a 90-minute music composition.

WW: Tell me a bit about the title of the installation. Obviously, it’s named “Secret Life” to reflect the title of Fred’s album, but the actual artwork title is Einder. What does that mean?

BA: What I really like about the work is that it has this quality of making you disappear in it or look at it forever. This specific version is also a bit like the horizon because it’s a surface splitting the space. “Einder” is an old Dutch word before we had “horizon.” The literal description in the dictionary is “the border between heaven and earth.” What I like about “einder” itself, phonetically, is that it in Dutch is “end”—basically “the infinite end.”  I think that’s why “einder” was the word for “horizon” because the horizon is the infinite end. 

I like the poetic connection with infinitely looking at something—the split between the space—and that it’s not yet a horizon; a thing we already know, but the infinite end. 

Behind the Melancholic Machine

WW: You mentioned getting beautiful messages in response to the work. What do you hope the lasting impression is of this work on its viewers?

BA: When we did the first curtain version in Berlin, and the first 15,000 people ever saw the work, it was like a memory machine. We had people sharing all these memories with us through stories, like their grandpa being a fisherman. What I really like about this work is that it’s sort of a melancholic trigger machine. When you combine this melancholic trigger machine with communal ritual, like the one that Fred is presenting, you get a hyper-melancholic machine. 

I don’t know if I want them to feel something. The proof of concept of this work, and the tour, is that people feel so safe and together in it that they are sending me their memories and stories— what it made them think about and why it made such an impression on them. I guess my answer is that if it speaks to you, I’m happy it did its work.

WW: When you present these kinds of works in a museum context, is there a different goal?

BA: Yes. It’s very different because it’s a bit more conceptualized. We also make the composition and content, and shrink the concept, in that sense. For example—it only being a water surface or a weather phenomenon, whereas now it’s really about the space speaking to you.

WW: How does it speak to you? 

BA: It makes me very calm to be in such a hyper environment. It was funny when we showed it for the first time to Fred—and for me, as well. It was very new. In this size, when you drop it, when so much fabric is released from tension, and when you light it, there is so much detail happening in front of you. You almost fall down yourself! Fred almost fell down. I don’t know why we look for that as humans, but that’s also what I’m looking for in that space.

WW: What do you like about making these kinds of spaces?

BA: What I really love about making these kinds of spaces is that you’re so in the niche of the niche of the niche of the niche—that you are making an instrument that is then controlling something, and then you start finding such weird details in a wave in a certain angle over the canvas, for example. That makes me super calm, to find that, and to continuously reiterate it.

It is very calming to be underneath something that breathes. It makes you feel present and aware. When the fabric is coming down as a full surface, you feel that it pushes this air out—and when it goes up, you also feel that it pulls. So, there is this sensory sensation that is very interesting underneath it.

New Meanings and Memories for New Crowds

WW: Has it been interesting for you to see the artwork in different settings, and with different types of crowds?

BA: Yeah, it has been very interesting. When we started off with Fred touring, I had to really get used to hearing beats. To be honest, I was like,” Whoa! This is a rave. Are we actually doing this?” That’s also why I really look forward to, within the context of this tour, having the chance tomorrow to see it in an artwork setting. 

What happened in this tour is that the fabric became a player within what was happening, which was something I didn’t really expect. If you break down what is happening, it’s DJ sets with scenery, right? But still, it’s magic. There is something else happening there. 

WW: Fred gained a lot of notoriety for his boiler room-style sets, with a big screen behind him showing the rest of the crowd what he was doing on stage. I experienced this during his Forest Hills Stadium tour two years ago. So, featuring an artwork above the crowd is a big departure from his typical scenography.

BA: That’s what I was scared about—that they always do this boiler room shot. He got famous through performing with these big images of him behind him. But then everyone actually wanted to let go of the screen—and I’m so happy that we did. But we still felt the responsibility for the fans. I was never part of a tour that had such fandom. Some of these Fred fans come so early, and they love him so dearly. I was a bit afraid to take the screen out, but in that sense, this work really sets an atmosphere for everyone. People feel that communal ritual feeling. Ritual is also such a big part of the installation work.

WW:  It feels more like a social experiment than an immersive space.

BA: Everyone is calling it immersive, but I don’t like that word because it’s much more. I think good art that is lived in a moment is better described as something very physical. People are interested and eager to experience this moment.

For questions or more information on Boris Acket’s work, contact his representation, KUNST Agency.