Sunjammer 6: A Tale Blown by a Solar Breeze is a love story, a conversation between two virtual characters connecting across time, each pushing back against an encroaching dark age.
I began by thinking about two characters across oceans of time and how they would communicate. One a mathematician, one an engineer. They might speak using mathematics. I was looking at our current moment and the relentless, exhausting polarization. This piece is really about the tension between the fear of knowledge, and the constructs humans use to build language and symbol systems that speak about what we can’t see, what we can’t touch. Mathematics, physics, the evolution of models of the cosmos…and the forces of attraction between heavenly bodies…or humans.
Hypatia, a Hellenistic astronomer, mathematician and philosopher assassinated in 415 AD returns 10 years in our future as a furious ghost. As she navigates her new environment, she absorbs what has happened over time and encounters Kepler Redux, a NASA engineer building a solar array off-world power station.
Sunjammer 6 has multiple versions: an infinity loop installation for groups of viewers, a full narrative performance with dancers playing the instrument for an audience in the round, a meet and greet with Hypatia that follows the performance version and an Augmented Reality book to be published fall 2026 by Scala Press.
Sunjammer 6 uses custom AI to allow virtual characters to see and react to multiple people by tracking and responding to their movement with interactive visuals and sound.
The project is a visual novel, a movie, and a machine that tells stories. A poetic and dreamlike experience, viewers activate the process and become embedded in another dimension.
Details on the technical setup and more about the project linked here.