The Pythagorean “harmony of the spheres” and resulting notions of the “musica mundana” (Boethius) and “harmonice mundi” (Johannes Kepler) once served as a universal model for explaining the order of the cosmos. The ideas of a world based on simple numerical proportions and of the unity of art and science continued to fascinate people until well into the modern era. “TETRAKTYS” plays with these interpretive contexts in subtle and ironic ways. Brand’s humming model of the spheres is generated with the aid of devices that are normally employed in entirely different contexts. The aerial drones, which form the corners of a virtual tetrahedron in space, function as sound generators of a mechanical model of the sky. Their simple chord structures, based on fifths, create changing sound surfaces that, as humming “spheres,” accompany the continually changing spatial constellations of the “celestial bodies.”
“TETRAKTYS” is part of a Jens Brand’s series of experiments with “world machines” – artistic and scientific models designed to challenge aspects of reality and to explain cosmological phenomena. Brand sees his devices and installations such as “G-Player” (2004), “Small World Machine” (2011) or “Space/Site Work II” (2013) as distinctive metaphors about the appropriation of space through sound or of sound through its spatial context. The installation “TETRAKTYS,” too, investigates this tension, going far back into the history of art and science.

Technical supervisor: Christian Trempler

Drone operators: Tassos Fytros, Antonis Lekanidis, Dimitris Stasinos (Flying Dog, Athens) and Christian Trempler