Blue

Digital animation
2023

The title Blue is taken from “An der schönen, blauen Donau, op. 314 (The Blue Danube)”, composed by Johann Strauss in 1866 and is the piano music for four hands that accompanies the video and the waltz that Stanley Kubrick famously used in 2001, a Space Odyssey for the space station docking scene. The tempo of the music is much slower than it should be expressing a kind of sadness as music played more slowly often does. The intention was not to create this sadness but rather to match the tempo of the music to the rhythm or rotational cycles of the object in the animation. The interstellar object in the video is called oumuamua, which means “scout” or “a messenger from afar arriving first” in Hawaiian. Oumuamua passed through the solar system in 2017 before continuing through interstellar space on its way to the constellation Pegasus. An interstellar object is a rogue object not gravitationally bound to a star like the sun.



There was a lot of speculation on what oumuamua was, but its mystery remains secure since we can no longer see it. It had an exaggeratedly elongated shape, a reddish colour, and no dust on its surface, like a sunburnt naked body. The brightness of the object varied a lot due to an erratic tumbling rotation along the short axis, like the spinning bone in 2001. This rotation plus three other rotations are included in the animation: a second rotation of the object along its long axis, so it spins like a rolling pin and then two rotations for the camera including a rotation of the camera as it creates an elliptical orbit around the spinning object. All the rotations are multiples of the tempo and time signature of the piano music to create a feeling of synchronization.



The animation opens with a reference to the black screen accompanied by György Ligeti’s orchestral work Atmosphères in Kubrick’s overture for 2001. The animation opens with a similar black screen, but with a recording of a two short sequences, one sequence from an old and distorted German language tape cassette combined with another short sequence from another old and distorted tape cassette of Ilocano folk music.