Agnieszka Polska | Thomas Wilfred | Robert Lippok & Lucas Gutierrez

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.

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.

Robert Lippok & Lucas Gutierrez: Non-face

Non-manifold geometries describe “fake-objects” – items that may look realistic, but can in fact not exist in the physical world. They develop their sensual plausibility in the digital world. One famous example is the Penrose-triangle: Its three beams appear to be positioned at right angles to each other, and yet they are connected to form a triangle. In 3D-animation, such objects regularly surface through so-called mesh-mistakes. For their first joint Fulldome-piece, sound artist Robert Lippok and digital artist Lucas Gutierrez have identified these frequently occurring mistakes in their own artistic practice and develop data structures to explore these fantastic objects. Their work produces different dimensionalities and creates new topological relations. This might not determine the inside or the outside of these impossible objects, but it will render the sonic and visual boundaries of a three-dimensional space tangible. To this end, the composition uses simulated reflections in physical and virtual spaces. Various methods of traditional instrument building are used to transcribe the virtual geometries into musical patterns which, in turn, weave sequences of notes and real-time emulations of different sound sources into multi-layered textures.