April 4, 2025 thru September 2026
A six-screen visual and surround-sound Interplanetary Experience!
Playing continuously - free with Museum admission
About the MARS Project
Earthly concerns weigh heavily upon us. So we look to the cosmos to understand our place in it, and hope to find our Earth-like qualities elsewhere. We project our terrestrial selves onto what we find, imagining a future beyond here. We see the beauty and strangeness of those places and imagine ourselves there.
We were not born of Mars. Our earthly bodies would be the aliens there. We must always bring Earth with us to inhabit another world.
We have arrived at Mars not knowing how its history might still be written without us. We have searched Mars not knowing if life ever existed there, or if life (or something else) is yet to emerge in deep time. We are a civilization of conquerors, yet we only inhabit the third planet from our star in the thinnest sliver of time.
Humans are how the universe witnesses itself. So how can we honor the universe? How shall we witness it?
If we can understand our place in the cosmos, we can appreciate Mars as a sentinel of our aloneness, and respect the parallel and starkly differing paths our planets have taken, and be grateful for Mother Earth.
KURT RIEMANN
Kurt Riemann is a composer and artist living in Anchorage, Alaska.
The MARS project visuals were created over a decade using digital data and orbital photography from NASA’s Mars orbiter. Using this telemetric data, Riemann conformed the data sets into 3-D images of actual Martian landscapes. Poring through thousands of images and spending thousands of hours rendering, he created 40 hours of video, from which the most compelling scenes were combined to create this work.
Everything on the screen is real. No Artificial Intelligence or generated media. All of the images were captured by NASA and processed by Kurt over the seven years this project was in motion. The colors come from both the human-like spectrum and past our Earthly optical senses into the Infrared, revealing a world beyond.
Musically, multiple compositions using a wide method of techniques were created and merged for the soundtrack. Analog, digital, and acoustic instruments formulate the resulting soundtrack. Many of the unearthly sounds were created by guest musicians from the Anchorage Symphony who created new sounds through extended techniques on their instruments.
The soundtrack is not earthly music. There is no parallel to what earthly music describes. The soundtrack is not descriptive of familiar living environments, but rather a billions-year-old landscape that has seen “A Trillion Days Without Rain”.
