Machinae Coelestis by Sciss

Machinae Coelestis (2013 / 2025) is a fixed media composition, originally for five channels and star projection, made during a residency in the Austrian town of Judenburg. Here I worked with the local soundscape and the local planetarium. What I find fascinating is the idea of the planetarium to picture the universe at the same time artificially and transparently (indistinguishable from “reality”). The mechanical projection technique is so sophisticated that the apparatus disappears in the background; it lays itself as a film on top of the foreground as soon as the stars start to move, and the dim reality of the projector now appears as an enormous cartographic memory. My challenge was to develop a dynamic sound composition which varies along with the chosen projection frames.

Most sounds originate from environmental recordings, some of which have been made during my artist residency, others which have been made in different places and times across the world. The location and dates chosen for the star projection correlate with those of the sound recordings. All sounds somehow, for me, are associated with the star-strewn sky, for example walking along a groyne towards the North Sea with the human lights fading behind and opening a view to the firmament. A subtle narrative is layered on top, suspended by two fragments of a dream diary. A careful choreography is made for the projection, varying the intensities of the different light sources, such as the stars, the environmental background luminosity, the intensity of the milky way. In the second half of the piece, a rhythmic element is introduced by a fast travel back in time which can be identified by the motion of the moon. The last section uses random displacements of the projector positions of increasing magnitude, introducing a staggering search across the universe accompanied by the slight sound of the projector motors themselves.

I later developed both stereo and eight channel mixes of the piece, also a computer generated video. In 2025, I came back to the piece and made a slightly different stereo mix, aimed at listening in a private environment.

sciss.de