Thomas Wilfred | David OReilly | Agnieszka Polska

Thomas Wilfred: Clavilux Jr #86 (1930)

With his lumia instruments that created compositions from electrical, mechanical and reflective elements, the American light artist Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) created a new art form at the crossroads between technology and modern art. The light paintings he composed – meditative, northern lights-like colour symphonies –, and which he presented quietly without musical accompaniment, earned him a place in the Museum of Modern Art, New York as part of the exhibition “15 Americans” in 1952 together with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

In collaboration with the Epstein Collection and Stiftung Planetarium Berlin, four of his works that were originally presented as screen and ceiling projections have been re-filmed and adapted for the first time for the largest visual space of our age, allowing them to be experienced in a new way. His symphonies will be presented in silence.

David OReilly: Eye of the Dream

The artist and game designer David OReilly travels with us through the development of life leading into our modern world, beginning at the moment before the Big Bang. This realtime simulation is governed by an array of interconnected, multi-layered systems inspired by musical composition – creating an optical experience that oscillates between dramatic and meditative, abstract and familiar, chaotic and ordered. “Eye of the Dream” evolved from David OReilly’s award-winning work “Everything”, and draws from a library of digital objects he created over a 15 year period.

Agnieszka Polska: The Happiest Thought

More than 250 million years ago, at the transition of the Permian to the Triassic eras, the largest known mass extinction in the Earth’s history occurred and up to 90 percent of the planet’s life was annihilated. This disturbing natural phenomenon and its impact are at the centre of visual artist Agnieszka Polska’s first fulldome piece. Her visual essay “The Happiest Thought” revives the Earth’s destroyed biosphere in the most poetic of ways. Agnieszka Polska’s point of departure is the “happiest thought” of the physicist Albert Einstein, what he later called the fundamental thought that inspired him to formulate his general theory of relativity in 1915, which understands space and time as dynamic entities. Sung by the US-American performance artist Geo Wyeth, the text becomes part of a hypnotically enchanting séance.