Whether you have sacred or secular views, it's likely that you have spent some time considering how strange and improbable life is. You've probably meditated on its resilient fragility. You may have been struck by how tragically finite we are. "Life is fleeting; therefore, life is beautiful. This expression is based on one of the values in Japanese aesthetics: impermanence." These words come from the provided statement by artist Takafumi Ide, whose installation "Propagate" is currently on display at the Hartnett Gallery.

Ide lectures on digital art at Stony Brook University and Suffolk County Community College. He was born in Tokyo and grew up in Japan, where "the fragile and transitory qualities of impermanence are considered of exceptional beauty," he says. Ide's art marries this old idea of valuing life with new-tech tools to create an empirical reminder of life's ephemeral, lovely nature.

Ide's installation incorporates fragile technological bits "to amplify the experience" with sound and light. In fact, the entire gallery is darkened, and the art can be seen only by the light of 16 very tiny LEDs. "Rather than solely a visual interaction," the artist says in his statement, "I am able to control the viewer's experience at the level of multiple senses, triggering the viewer's memory." The piece reads like a journey through our consciousness, to reenact that pre-birth space that none of us recall.

Apprehending the installation is like coming upon a sacred circle (inside a spaceship), with otherworldly lights and the sounds of good intentions being chanted in different tongues. Arranged in a ring about 10 feet in diameter are 16 two-tiered platforms suspended from the ceiling by fragile wires. "All of my recent work has been suspended from the ceiling," says Ide. "The hanging structures give a sense of instability, which rightly describes my anxiety of the future. At the same time, the combination of fragility and floating objects is as fleeting as a web between branches, inferring ephemeral life like that of a mayfly."

The lower panels are suspended at about knee height, the upper panels met my waist, and the tiny, faintly bluish LEDs hit just below my eye level. Images of seeds and seedpods on transparency film, like small frosted windows, make up the top panels. Their shadows are projected by the flickering lights onto the lower panels, and appear in a bubble of light, as ash blocks off all but a small space around the seeds on the top platform. A small speaker attached under each bottom panel projects voices that sound in synch with the flickering lights. In effect, human presence is one with the light, and casts a shadow.

A central hub of a computer on the ceiling above springs a web of wires, which run toward the spots from which the panels are suspended. Above the circle, mystical, shimmery air-rushing ethereal notes play at intervals. I never understand why people always choose to identify the sacred with notes that resemble a herd of unicorns breathing rainbow vapor. The overlaying, watery whir-whir-whir of the in-utero heartbeat used here hits home, and is more suited to the artist's ideas.

"Propagate" is soothing: in the dark, with the alternating soft lights, the sounds and soft voices. The low volume makes the words ambiguous, but after a while I could discern what the male and female voices were saying, taking turns across the circle. "I love, I protect, I hope, I share, I nurture" are repeated in a cycle of fewer than two minutes, with each phrase spoken in different languages, including that computer-generated voice made famous by Stephen Hawking.

The cycle of words starts slowly after a few synched pulses of light and ethereal notes, and the chanting gets quicker in succession, closer together, building to a peak of no words. Then all of the lights stay on and shine brighter in three pulses (even visible with closed eyes), each accompanied by the music in a higher pitch, creating anticipation with a denouement of only darkness and silence. A few moments later, it starts again.

Various associations float through my brain, the most prominent being that the disembodied voices are from parents to a pre-birth child, as yet strangers to each other, the parents speaking of loving intentions. In synch with the lights, the parents' intentions push the images of the offspring into a fragile, flickering shadow form, creating the gentlest birth I've ever witnessed.

Though "Propagate" is meant to serve as a meditation on the miracle and brevity of life, this kind of art projects a space-age, futuristic feeling. I'm usually put off by new-agey stuff, but in this case, the spacey music seems to symbolize infinity, so the art at once speaks of origins and hope, fragility and death, and the mystery of the eternal. Though perhaps not immediately accessible, it's worth the experience, and the reminder to value life's frail, finite beauty.

Propagate

By Takafumi Ide

Through April 12

Hartnett Gallery, Wilson Commons, UR River Campus

275-4188, sa.rochester.edu/hartnett

Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday noon-5 p.m.