“Recurrent Anaximander”, by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, is a generative animation running on a custom-made 400,000 pixel circular display. The piece features a solar simulation made with Reaction Diffusion, Navier Stokes, Voronoi and Perlin Noise algorithms, running on top of a Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) image that is updated daily by NASA. Small planets in orbit create infrequent eclipses that aid the trompe l’oeil render perspective. The project is named after Anaximander of Miletus (610-545 BCE), the pre-Socratic philosopher who first explained eclipses as a function of a cosmos that is all around us and whose concept of the World’s origin from and collapse into the “apeiron” (the “indefinite”) greatly influenced thinkers up to and including contemporary cosmogeny.

Solar simulation graphics programmed by Kitae Kim.