April 4, 2025 thru September 2026
A six-screen visual and surround-sound Interplanetary Experience!
Total running time 144 minutes,
playing continuously.
Free with Museum admission
The completed installation at the Anchorage Museum
As Earthly concerns weigh upon us, we look to the cosmos for understanding, searching for reflections of ourselves in distant worlds. We imagine a future beyond Earth, projecting our presence onto places both beautiful and strange.We were not born of Mars. On a red planet, we are the aliens. To survive, we must carry Earth with us.
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Our civilization of explorers and conquerors have only inhabited our own small world for a fleeting moment. We arrive at Mars not knowing how its future would unfold without us. We have searched its surface, uncertain whether life once existed, or if something unknown may yet emerge in the depths of time.
We must venture cautiously.
Humans are how the universe witnesses itself. We find ourselves stewards of our solar system. How do we honor what we find? Shall we protect planetary sovereignty?
Understanding our place in the cosmos, we recognize Mars as a sentinel of solitude, a world that has followed a starkly different path from our own. And in doing so, may we cherish the Earth that made us.
Kurt Riemann
Kurt Riemann (b. 1959) is a composer and artist living in Anchorage, Alaska. He has been working in electronic music since he first reversed a reel of tape at age nine. In the decades since, he has produced a multitude of compositions and audio-visual art. He is focused on electronic music, developing his musical works through emerging technologies.
Alaska has informed his visual art, from living through the sudden and life-changing geologic impact of the 1964 Earthquake, through spending endless frigid winter nights photographing the Aurora, and following the Alaska's rhythms through time-lapse photography.
Riemann discovered his musical home in the Chance music of John Cage and David Tudor, in the mind-bending, abstract world of tape music of Tod Dockstader, the precision of the electronic synthesis of Wendy Carlos, and in the fearless orchestral structures of fellow Alaskan John Luther Adams.
About the Exhibit
Nearly a decade in process, MARS is Riemann's largest audio-visual creation. The Anchorage Museum installation features six screens of never-before-seen Mars video. These MARS visuals were painstakingly created by Riemann using digital data and orbital photography from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Using this data, Riemann created these 3D images of actual Martian landscapes. Working through a vast collection of images and spending thousands of hours rendering, the process ultimately resulted in 50 hours of video from which the most compelling scenes were combined to create this work.
Everything you see on the screen is real. No AI or generated media was used. All of the images were captured from orbit by NASA and carefully processed by Riemann. The varied and sometimes unexpected colors come from capturing both the human-like spectrum and from beyond what our Earthly visual senses can detect in the infrared, revealing a world hidden just beyond our sight.
The Music
The original soundtrack work incorporates Spectral, Classical and Experimental composition, supported with electronic and computer sound design. Dozens of individual compositions were created and layered for the soundtrack. The analog, digital, and acoustic instruments were processed and re-processed to formulate the resulting surround-soundscape.
Many of the unearthly sounds were created by guest musicians from the Anchorage Symphony who created new sounds on their instruments using extended techniques.
At one point, the sound of a tiny speck of Mars rock (from a Martian meteorite discovered on Earth) was sonically multiplied a ten thousand times to recreate the sound of a dusty avalanche. These subtle details in the soundtrack bring the scope of MARS into being.
This soundtrack is not Earthly music. The results are different to what Earthly music evokes - the soundtrack is not meant to be descriptive of our familiar and living environment, but rather a billions-year-old landscape, millions upon millions of miles away, that has experienced A Trillion Days Without Rain.
LICENSING AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Contact - kurt.riemann@gmail.com
Images: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
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