Solaris
Solaris is part of the collective multimedia production “A Space Journey” developed by Georg Hajdu, Ron Zimmering and Elise Schobeß. It consists of three movement performed at the beginning, the middle and the end of the show which can be viewed in its entirety at this URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2TCAVtklrQ. Also see the documentation of the project.
The ocean of Solaris is unlike anything known to date and pushes science to its limits. Stanislaw Lem’s novel describes a planet with an extraordinary life form that may far surpass Earth’s organisms. Whether the ocean can be understood as a “being” and whether it can be described as thinking is something no one can decide. All attempts at contact have failed. But how can humans communicate with such a being when they cannot even communicate with each other? The ocean of Solaris thus becomes a symbol of the cosmos, whose size and complexity fundamentally challenge human cognitive abilities.
Georg Hajdu: “The universe is full of mysteries that stimulate our imagination but also reveal the limits of our imagination. From the Big Bang, when the universe exploded from the tiniest of tiny particles into cosmic dimensions, to the emergence of matter, from which life then formed after eons from carbon chains. This in turn led to the development of the nervous system and thus the prerequisites for thought, research, and cognition. Here on Earth, which had exactly the right conditions to bring forth life, it took 13,800,000,000 years for the universe to become aware of itself. Are we unique, or are there conscious intelligences swarming in the at least 100000000000 galaxies, each with the same number of stars? And if so, what would that mean for us? Each of us lives here with 7922312800 other people, and we find it so difficult to listen to and respect one another. The beauty of the universe, but also the paradoxes that arise when we contemplate it, is the subject of the project A Space Journey, and hardly any author has captured this better than Stanisław Lem in his novel Solaris. Using excerpts from his book, Ron Zimmering, Janina Luckow, and I, with the support of the Bergedorf Observatory, Nicolas Desmars, and Johanna Link, have created a three-part zoom from the macrocosm of the universe to the mesocosm of the ocean and down to the microcosm of human cognition, which is made possible in the first place by brains that are very similar to the filament structure of the universe. In the end, we are left with the realization that we already know a lot, but not enough to understand why we are here, and I fear that even alien or artificial intelligence will not be able to tell us that.”
Solaris I
Composition: Georg Hajdu
Director: Ron Zimmering
Video: KLARA (Janina Luckow)
3D simulation: Denis Wittor, David Smolinski
Science: Kathrin Böckmann
Costumes: Julian Philip Hirsch
Schauspiel: Johanna Link
Solaris II
Komposition: Georg Hajdu
Regie: Ron Zimmering
Video: KLARA (Janina Luckow)
3D-Simulation: Nicolas Desmars
Wissenschaft: Kathrin Böckmann
Kostüm: Julian Philip Hirsch
Schauspiel: Johanna Link
Solaris III
Komposition: Georg Hajdu
Regie: Ron Zimmering
Video: KLARA (Janina Luckow)
Wissenschaft: Kathrin Böckmann
Kostüm: Julian Philip Hirsch
Schauspiel: Johanna Link
The composition process was described in this 2023 TENOR paper:
Hajdu, G. and Fu, X. Sonification, Musification and Dramafication of Astronomical Data in the Multimedia Production “A Space Journey”. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation, Boston (2023).