KEPLER’S DREAM BEAUTIFULLY RESURRECTED NOW
Ideas begin with dreams --whether they happen during sleep, while gazing out a window, or in the shower. Hypotheses develop during the process of making sense. Models and theories give shape, bringing dreams closer to realities.
Kepler’s Dream is a new visual work, created by Michael Burk and Ann-Katrin Krenz, a pair of students in the Digital Media Design department at Berlin University of Arts. Inspired by German astronomer Johannes Kepler’s geometric model for the solar system as well as by the “antique” technology of overhead projection.
They began with an investigation into how seemingly obsolete technology can be repurposed for our digital age.
In Mysterium Cosmographicum, published in 1596, Kepler proposed a model, based on the geometry of Platonic solids. Mercury (represented by an octahedron), Venus (icosahedron), Earth (dodecahedron), Mars (tetrahedron), Jupiter (tetrahedron), were set inside one another and separated by a series of inscribed and circumscribed spheres, all enclosed within a larger sphere that represented the orbit of Saturn.
Burk and Krenz have developed a new format for 3D-printed art for Kepler’s Dream, They printed a sculpture and extended it by bouncing light around it using an old-school overhead projector. The combination of digital and analog technology works together to form a dreamlike experience.
The installation creates an aura of mysticism with the help of an interactive presentation. It is uniquely designed to project beautiful geometric shapes that are correlated to the equally beautiful mathematical formulas that Kepler had once written about.
The Kepler’s Dream spherical sculpture projects light like a multi-dimensional slide. The metal projection machine beams light from overhead. Diffused light reflects off the white sphere, before it passes through the lenses and onto the wall to produce a triptych of wall projections with different hues and depths of fields.
You can control what you see projected by turning the sphere in different directions. Check out this video.
Although, Kepler's original dream vision had to be abandoned, his research spawned his three laws of orbital dynamics, the first of which was that the orbits of planets are ellipses rather than circles, changing the course of physics and astronomy.
Read more about Beautiful Dreams, as they relate to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including Building Dreams Now.
Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Dreams in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT 09.07.14. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!
PHOTO CREDITS:
- Photo: by Ann-Katrin Kenz. Kepler’s Dream.
- Photo: by Ann-Katrin Kenz. Kepler’s Dream.
- Photo: by Ann-Katrin Kenz. Kepler’s Dream.
- Illustration: by Johannes Kepler. Kepler's Platonic solid model of the Solar system from Mysterium Cosmographicum.
- Photo: by Ann-Katrin Kenz. Kepler’s Dream.
- Photo: by Ann-Katrin Kenz. Kepler’s Dream.
- Photo: by Ann-Katrin Kenz. Kepler’s Dream.
- GIF: Courtesy of Michael Burk and Ann-Katrin Krenz. Kepler’s Dream.
- Photo: by Ann-Katrin Kenz. Kepler’s Dream.
- Photo: by Ann-Katrin Kenz. Kepler’s Dream.
