On the domed cornea of your round eyeballs, there’ll be a flickering reflection of two large rings spinning continuously, surrounded by a swarm of silver bubbles, within the half-sphere of the Fulldome. The circles, rings, domes, and spheres of digital artist Lucas Gutierrez and sound artist Robert Lippok’s “SPIN” form an animated cosmos of flux and mutation, where image and sound exude a bodily presence. To a soundscape composed of hundreds of sound recordings of objects, machines and ecologies, the viewer is guided along and amongst the rings: Surfing on slippery and shiny ripples, skittering across its coiling and undulating skin – papillary ridges and creases, fur, iridescent slime, and perfect gloss.

The different textures merge and emerge as the bodies spin, contract, and stretch. Alien and scaleless, they could be microscopic, or vast landscapes, or planets. Their vibrant surface is illuminated by restless reflections of a light source constantly on the move – like a searchlight operated by wind gusts. It is as if Lippok and Gutierrez set out to design nature – a kind of nature that is not an imitation, not a likeness, not in our own image. “SPIN” proposes an ecology that is environment and body, whose animate matter communicates with us through transformation, association, and unpredictable change.

Lucas Gutierrez & Robert Lippok: SPIN (2021, 13 min)
Image / Visuals: Lucas Gutierrez
Composition / Sounddesign : Robert Lippok
Production supervisor: Georgios Mavrikos
Postproduction video: Florian Meyer
Spatial sound mixing: Timo Bittner
A coproduction of Berliner Festspiele / The New Infinity & Stiftung Planetarium Berlin