Standing under the center of the Angelus Novus Vault in the garden of Palazzo Mora in Venice while holding up a mobile device equipped with the Plato’s Cave App, one can see the inside of Brunelleschi’s dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore. The inside of the augmented reality dome is “painted” with the animated mashup of the original Vasari fresco depicting The Last Judgement and Kiss’s Assembly/Disassembly. The augmented reality experience via the Plato’s Cave App reveals the coincidence of the self-balancing architectonics in Brunelleschi’s curved space engineering, in Vasari’s vision of Dante’s non-Euclidean, spherical cosmology and in the perfect moral balance of The Last Judgement.

Work in progress

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the History of Philosophy

A Local Spirit - Research Film Studio Production (Erika Kiss).

The Quantum Research Films collaboration by Erika A. Kiss and Chris Tully stretches the limits of the new literacy of architectonic rhetoric. Their research films pursue persuasive and aesthetically informed dramatic data visualization used for representing quantum phenomena. Pure quantum states have no external interactions and no sense for the direction of time therefore cannot be conceptualized from the classical humanistic, single fixed-point perspective. While the single fixed point of view emerges from observing the tangible functionalism of classical physical systems, quantum thinking requires the imagination to give up the single fixed perspective of the classical observer and assume a dynamic, 360-degree, non-anthropomorphic, rather, environmental perspective in a radical break with the tangible-object fetishism that is habitual to the mind. Since classic verbal, geometrical, and cinematic representations are suited for classical Newtonian physics, we need new representational strategies to communicate quantum thinking in a perspicuous and persuasive manner. Quantum research films enable audiences to use their imagination counterintuitively, so that the mind can be adjusted to quantum systems of non-tangible relationality and non-directional spatial-temporal conceptions. Two such research film installations directed by Kiss can be viewed in Venice as part of the Architectural Biennale 2023 until November 26.

“The belief that the universe as a whole might be round (or more generally, curved) is a much more recent one. It seems to require mathematics of the 19^th century (non-Euclidean geometry) even to formulate the notion. It is therefore a considerable surprise to find, on closer reading, that Dante’s cosmology as not a simple geometrically as it first appears, but actually seems to be a so-called “closed” universe, the 3-sphere, a universe which also emerges as a cosmological solution of Einstein’s equations in general relativity theory.”

Mark Peterson: Dante and the 3-sphere in American Journal of Physics, 1979/12/01

Work in progress

A circa 50-minute full-dome research film using telescopic NASA images and original animation in the style of Kiss’s Assembly&Dissassembly (2023) to capture Dante’s non-Euclidian 3-sphere cosmology that physicists liken to Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The Atlantis Project is a new Princeton faculty collaboration across disciplines.