footage of the sun: . taken by simon2940, the footage is the courtesy of simon2940 and shown here with the approval of the owner.
STARING AT THE SUN IN TIMES OF DARKNESS
As part of a wider cosmology and research this body of work unfolds in several chapters.
At the threshold of solar engineering, quantum physics, myth, and spiritual technology , this research approaches the sun as technological, spiritual and cosmological force. Between the engineering of energy and its mythological imaginaries, it searches for forms of knowledge that might unsettle the human as the privileged site of perception.
The body emerges as an energetic apparatus: a living constellation of meridians, vibrations, sensations, and invisible transmissions. Through choreographic inquiry, gestures are investigated as practices of attunement, opening the body toward radical intimacy with the more-than-human.
What if the technologies we seek beyond ourselves are already inscribed within us? What can the sun teach us about circulation, transformation, and survival?
A speculative archaeology of the body as solar technology, and an invitation to imagine futures beyond extraction, mastery, and human exceptionalism.
Chapter I/
absence is a form /a shape.
chapter I resulted in an experimental film and embodied choreography work in progress on the human-sun-salt entanglements and was funded by Goethe Institute and realized in collaboration with AADK SPAIN, 2025 within their immersive Residency program.
Salt, like the sun, is an ancient yet present force—a material residue of light and absence, a bridge between deep time and the body As of April 2025, we are in Solar Cycle 25, which began in December 2019. This cycle is approaching its predicted peak, known as the solar maximum, expected around July 2025. During this phase, the Sun exhibits heightened activity, including an increased number of sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These phenomena can significantly impact Earth's space weather, potentially disrupting satellite communications and power grids, while also enhancing auroral displays like the Northern and Southern Lights. Solar cycle 25 is the current solar cycle, the 25th since 1755, when extensive recording of solar sunspot activity began. It began in December 2019 with a minimum smoothed sunspot number of 1.8.[2] It is expected to continue until about 2030.
sun cyles/rythms: The solar cycle is a natural cycle the Sun goes through as it transitions between low and high magnetic activity. Roughly every 11 years, at the height of the solar cycle, the Sun’s magnetic poles flip — on Earth, that’d be like the North and South poles swapping places every decade — and the Sun transitions from being calm to an active and stormy state.
“what is god as this omnipresence. the untouchable. this web of photons around, within. allover. be touched by in every second without ever having the chance to touch this/it yourself. …is salt the essence (?), the child of the entanglement of sun and earth.” we always just think of presence of water as the essence of life. but also the slow extraction of it, resulting in a form of crystalized absence of water is the essence of life salt making as a ritual of bringing movement to water (planetary and intracellular) Salt is solar matter crystallized—the residue of evaporated seas, an archive of sunlight embedded in the Earth's crust. It moves with the breath of the Sun, dissolving and reforming, marking time not in hours but in the slow, precise language of mineral and light.Salt becomes here a carrier of this tension: the embodied archive of solar presence and the crystallized absence of water—a sacred paradox. The film enters into the mystery of how salt, which emerges through the complete extraction of liquid, becomes essential to navigating fluidity itself—both planetary and intracellular. It proposes that salt is the child of the entanglement between the sun and the Earth, the mineral that knows how to hold absence, the body that knows how to pulse with memory. “Absence is a form.”
Chapter II/
GOD IS CHANGE
“God is Change.” — Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
The second chapter of Staring at the Sun in Times of Darkness takes its title from Octavia E. Butler’s radical cosmology, where change is not understood as a rupture or a force to be controlled, but as the fundamental condition of existence itself. In Butler’s vision, transformation becomes an elemental intelligence — a force through which humans must learn to adapt, sense, and reconfigure their relationship with the living systems that sustain them.
God Is Change unfolds as a speculative exploration of the invisible energetic exchanges between the human body, the Earth, and the cosmic forces that shape our becoming. Through sculptural elements, electromagnetic research, movement, and analog sound, the chapter investigates the Sun not only as a distant celestial body, but as an active source of information, energy, and transformation — a continuous solar influx that enters Earth’s atmosphere, affects biological rhythms, and participates in the evolution of life.
The sculptures function as amplifiers of a spiritual technology — speculative instruments that make perceptible what is normally hidden. Inspired by the electromagnetic dance-media experiments of Philippa Cullen and Leo Theremin’s inventions, particularly the Terpsiton, the sculptural environment explores how proximity, gesture, and movement can activate invisible fields. Rather than representing technology as external machinery, the work approaches the body itself as a sensing and transmitting device: a living antenna embedded within planetary and cosmic networks.
Metal, minerals, sand, and reflective surfaces become resonant materials within this research. Carrying traces of the Earth’s geological memory and the iron present within human blood, these elements create a poetic dialogue between terrestrial and biological magnetism. The sculptures operate as interfaces between matter and vibration, transforming electromagnetic relationships into movement, sound, and spatial experience. Like Chladni plates revealing hidden patterns through vibration, these structures invite the emergence of unseen geometries — energetic fields becoming temporarily visible through material encounter.
The Sun’s radiation and magnetic activity become a speculative language through which the project explores a deeper form of navigation: not only orientation through space, but orientation through sensation, intuition, and collective awareness. What signals are already moving through our bodies before they become conscious? How do electromagnetic fields influence affect, memory, and emotion? Could movement become a way of translating planetary frequencies into embodied knowledge?
Through this expanded understanding of technology, the sculptures become vessels for a different kind of intelligence — not a technology of extraction and domination, but a technology of listening, reciprocity, and connection. They propose a form of solar somatics, where the human body is understood as part of a larger energetic ecology: shaped by the Earth beneath, the Sun above, and the invisible forces continuously flowing between them.
God Is Change invites a shift from seeing the world as a collection of separate entities toward sensing it as a field of constant transformation. The sculptures become portals for this perception — instruments through which humans, nonhuman beings, and planetary forces enter into a shared choreography of becoming.
