ID#: 806

The Breathing of this Celestial Machine (2024) ; 9:00

by Luke Dzwonczyk

University of California, Berkeley

The smallest things, like grains of sand and cells, and the largest structures, like the cosmos, the “celestial machine,” are all created from the same fundamental building blocks. The title of the work, drawn from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks on water, points to a tension between the concepts of breathing and machine. Breathing is not just a fundamental aspect of being alive; it offers us a path to turn inward and even a connection to our spiritual life. How can we reconcile breathing, something so close to our humanity, with the seeming artificiality of machines? If this “celestial machine” is truly a machine at a grand scale, what does its breathing look like? The Breathing of this Celestial Machine combines videos generated from custom code with the recording of a laser drawing over the projection. The music blends recordings of modular synthesizer improvisations, samples, and other digitally synthesized sounds. The videos are a result of research into using Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image generative diffusion model, to create music reactive videos. The four rectangular videos are created with the same text prompts but different random seeds, meaning each video traverses the same concepts but visualizes them slightly differently. Additionally, each video is audio reactive, changing its visual characteristics in response to different sonic features.