Piña Why is the Sky Blue?, video and VR installation, Stephanie Comilang & Simon Speiser, shown at MAAC Ecuador, National Gallery Canada, UQ Art Museum Australia, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, Tate Modern UK, Julia Stoschek Berlin and others.
From a global open call for artists, Simon Speiser was selected for a residency during our winter 2024 science_technology_society thematic season. A year after his residency, Delfina Foundation sat down with Simon to reflect on his work, how his practice evolved, and the research at Delfina that shaped his future projects.
Delfina Foundation: You engaged with the concept of ‘speculative physics’ as a core point of research during your residency at Delfina. Can you break down a bit more what ‘speculative physics’ is and how it relates to your practice?
Simon Speiser: So speculative physics is kind of a broad term, but in general, it is the field of scientific research that tries to advance the field of physics beyond what is currently measurable or provable, therefore speculating on possible underlying structures that shape our reality. In my Film Naufragio Liberador (Liberating Shipwreck) the astronomer Marino Guarin described it quite well in regards to string theory: “ String Theory is a proposition to the theory of everything… to unify quantum theory with the theory of relativity. … A large part of the scientific community says that string theory is not a scientific theory, it is a metaphysical theory, it is beyond the physical, it is beyond the verifiable.” And this intersection between science and metaphysics is what interests me the most. I feel like speculative physics might be able to bridge between indigenous cosmologies, conceptions of ghosts and deities and contemporary science-based thinking. In some ways, I do think that this could actually be key for our mental health to not lose our humanity in this ever-evolving alienation from our physical realities through technology.
DF: You’ve mentioned Sara Imari Walker’s Life as No One Knows It as part of this research during your residency. There’s a quote from the publication that reminds me of some of your work, both sculptural and VR pieces: ‘objects that are larger than us in time look “abstract” and “informational.”’ I’m wondering if there’s any resonance with this when it comes to your previous works. I’m thinking of specifically this sense of surrealism or otherworldliness in ‘Floats’ (2019).
SS: I love that you made this association between this quote and “Floats”. Sara Imari Walker’s work is super interesting, as she is one of the scientists that are developing the assemble theory, a speculative theory that is already finding ways of being applied, in the search for alien life forms. The idea is that the complexity of an object, measured by the minimum number of steps needed to assemble it from basic building blocks, can reveal whether it is more likely to have arisen through natural physical processes or through the organising principles of life. This is based on the fact that living systems tend to produce highly complex, difficult-to-randomly-assemble structures. This way, we don’t narrow down our search for life by our own understanding of what life on earth is, but anchor it in the reality of physics.
My work, Floats is in some way related to that, even though it has a very different origin story. The work is inspired by the children’s book “Momo” by Michael Ende, which is a capitalist critique, and has this beautiful metaphor for time, the “hour flowers”. It is a sort of materialisation of time, and there is even a place where time is born. It takes place in a small idyllic town where people have a nice community and are there for each other until the grey men arrive. The grey men are constantly smoking cigars and are making deals with the adults to save time in their time banks, while their cigars are actually made from the leaves of the “hour flowers”, and they are hastily consuming everyone’s time.
For me, the idea of the material of time fascinated me, so I wanted to create a VR experience where one travels through time via objects. For this, I made 3D scans of some artifacts from the collection of the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, but I also wanted to introduce the subjective aspect of time within this simulation. I collected objects from friends and family that would remind them of a specific moment in their lives. This way these objects range from rocks with patterns made by microbes over 100 million years ago to a golden Motorola razor phone Peaches got at Coachella in 2007, to little paper cocktail umbrellas I somehow still had from my own childhood and used for my daughter’s birthday party.
Thinking of assemble theory, all these objects would be fascinating studies for alien lifeforms to analyse what defines life on our planet.
DF: You note that Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s work, The Disordered Cosmos, is something you were reading during your residency. To me, Dr Prescod-Weinstein’s work seems relevant to your film Naufragio Liberador.
SS: Yes the disordered cosmos was quite relevant for me in the development of Naufragio Liberador, a film that looks at the history of the maroon society of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, through the lens of string theory, superimposing conceptions of black holes with the occurrences of shipwrecks on the coast of Esmeraldas. These shipwrecks enabled the freedom of Afro-Ecuadorian communities as early as 1533, when they established maroon settlements, which became a haven for many others. The film is currently shown at the Bienal das Amazônias in Belem Brazil and a version of it was shown at Piccadilly Circus on the 25th of September as part of the Circa Art Prize.
Currently, I’m working on an installation of scratch holograms that will be shown at Transmediale in January and at Kinderhook & Caracas in Berlin in March. Since the inception of the film, I wanted to develop a sculptural counterpoint to it. The hologram, as an object that sits between dimensions, has always felt like the right material for it. During my residency, I experimented with the concept of the scratch holograms at the makerspace at Somerset House, a technique that is so simple that it can actually be done by hand. Through its simplicity, it bridges between the futuristic disembodied light reflections and the concrete materiality of scratches in golden metal plates.
DF: Collaboration is a big part of your practice, could you talk a bit about “Piña Why is the Sky Blue?” and its collaborative aspect?
SS: Sure, “Piña Why is the Sky Blue?” is collaborative project I made with my wife Stephanie Comilang, it was super inspiring and actually introduced me to making speculative documentary films. As we were traveling to both the Philippines and Ecuador for previous solo projects we realized how strong the similarities between these two geographically far apart countries were. This was the initial spark that started this project and we started researching pre-colonial shamanism in both countries and how this knowledge survived this shared colonial history.
As the babaylan ( pre-colonial philippina shaman) were historically mostly women, to the point that if a man wanted to become a babaylan they had to transition to a woman, the concept of a matriarchy became a important cornerstone for the project. As we wanted to not just reflect on the history of the survival of this ancestral knowledge, but also speculate on how this can be passed on into a future, a steering away from the patriarchal system that got us where we are, seemed only logical.
In the Ecuadorian amazon we also worked with the feminist collective called Cyber Amazonas, which is a pan amazonian collective that brings together voice from women in various indigenous communities that live between Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. They use a multitude of media, ranging from radio, film and writing to exchange their stories and fight for womens rights within these communities while maintaining their cultural practices.
All of these elements culminate in the intimate encounter with Piña, a future AI shaman that faces the visitor through a VR headset as part of the VR video installation.
DF: You engage with technology from a theoretical perspective and use it as a framework to find intersections between other concepts, but you also have an interest in tech news across various outlets. Can you outline a bit of how these two separate ways of approaching a topic may influence your work?
SS: My interest in technology originates from my interest in science fiction. I always think back to days in my childhood when I visited my dad and we would go hiking, and find a nice spot at a river or something. He would read me science fiction short stories. Maybe this is something that early on sparked an interest in me to bring together nature and technology within my work.
The theoretical aspect is something that came much later, I think it’s something that I discovered when reading “The Three Body Problem” by Liu Cixin, a trilogy that is considered hard science fiction, weighing in on the science behind the futuristic technologies and technological concepts in the book. Liu Cixin is quite known for researching and cultivating friendships with speculative physicist I really love his writing, and he is a big inspiration for me.
My curiosity for gadgets and obsession with observing where new technologies are evolving is something that I think is very much rooted in my early interest in print making. I went to an art high school in Frankfurt and we had the luxury of learning a multitude of printmaking techniques, from silkscreen to etching and lithography. Working these mostly analogue machines and the constant tweaking and adjusting of a multitude of possible variables to achieve a desired outcome is something that really fascinated me. This obsession with the machines moved on from traditional printmaking to 3D printing and from there to 3D scanning, virtual reality and now robotics, all fields that are constantly evolving and provide an insatiable stream of nerdy content.
DF: Your practice moves across quite a few mediums, including moving image, textile work, sculpture, and virtual reality. Why is this interdisciplinary approach important to your practice, and how did you develop this methodology? In particular, how did VR become an interest of yours, and why is it something important to your practice?
SS: As storytelling is a key aspect of my work, I became quite interested in finding ways of bridging fiction and reality. Therefore, sculptural work became a crucial way of materialising artefacts from the stories, especially in relation to 3D printing, where the translation between the digital to the physical turns into an allegory. In that phase of my work, I would also work with flavours as a way to immerse people even with other senses than our visual sense, from chocolate fountains to sculpted e-cigarettes. In 2017, as virtual reality experienced a renaissance and became more approachable, I developed my first VR piece, In a Young World of Resplendent Glitter. This threw me into new depths of nerdiness, discovering 3D scanning and point clouds as a sort of virtual material. I travelled to both Brazil and Ecuador to do 3D scans in the rainforest, collecting material for a recreation of the sparkling forest from my Matuhi stories. Through the point clouds, and in search for a physical representation of these digital worlds, I found my way to weavings and Ada Lovelace. Thinking of weavings as a foundation of our computational reality fascinated me, and opened up ways to think of new technologies in relation to our history and interconnectedness of our past, present and future.
The interplay of different media has become a conceptual tool to describe not just our physical reality but also the metaphysical that lies in between.
As VR has evolved over the years, new possibilities opened up and things like passthrough AR became a thing. Touching Clouds is a piece I developed together with my friend Norbert Pape a dancer and mathematician, I met during my time in Frankfurt. Passthrough AR is a way to merge both the virtual and physical realities around oneself, the visibility of the physical world, the viewer is much more grounded in their surroundings and the people around them. This enables a whole other freedom of movement and sense of security that made it possible for us to think of the XR headset as a form of chorographical object. Through the interaction with the virtual objects, a spontaneous choreography unfolds, and the piece becomes visible not just to the people within XR but to everyone else as well.
DF: You also have a publishing practice, grounded by the publication like biting into sugar, which you released in 2017. It’s interesting to see the publication described as a ‘phantasmagoria’, a book, a room. It becomes more than just a work of literature and moves beyond the pages. What is the intention behind this approach?
SS: Writing is, in my view, the most powerful and immersive medium of them all, just with pen and paper one can create worlds in people’s heads that can trigger all sorts of sensorial experiences with the mind alone. During my time at the Städelschule, I felt most attached to Mark von Schlegell’s fiction class. We would discuss writing, publish collections of short stories and poetry, and perform theatre plays. This is where I deepened my interest in telling stories through my art practice. I don’t write very regularly, but when I write, it usually turns into a sort of visceral experience. A big part of the book can be described as sci-fi erotica. In a way, I like to create worlds that reach beyond the body, beyond what is human. I try to find ways of bridging between nature, technology and spirituality, through which I hope to create phantastical spaces that ideally can be felt through the pages.
DF: You work in dialogue with storytelling, specifically Ecuadorian folklore and spiritual encounters, and at times, like in La Visión del Monte 2023, engage with your own family stories by including family members. This is fascinating as you also juxtapose this with speculative futures and technologies. How do you work alongside these two approaches?
SS: Science fiction is never just a projection into a possible future, but always also a reflection of the present it was written in and a history that it builds upon. As much as I have a fascination for new technologies, I always feel a disembodiment in the way most contemporary tech startups think about our future. Therefore, I feel we need to bring more of our ancestral stories and knowledge with us, into the process of imagining our future, and this way create a possible world that carries more of our collective humanity than the sci-fi that inspired our current rather dystopian trajectory.
DF: You’ve mentioned that DIY and open-source communities are something important to your work. It would be interesting to know the importance of these knowledge exchanges, particularly in the wake of so much privatisation of technology.
SS: When I get frustrated with the state of contemporary society and the way we isolate ourselves as individuals, I am always surprised by the collective nature of software and hardware and the way that strangers on the internet are ready to help each other for free just for the fun and shared excitement of technological problems. This is something that gives me hope in humanity. Many of my projects rely quite a bit on techniques, software, hardware and ideas that get shared on YouTube and GitHub by these communities. Even though the private sector is an ever-growing dominant force in our lives, these corporations rely heavily on the open-source nature of technology. At the same time, I feel like the dynamic of these communities will always find ways to replace or avoid corporate dependencies. As our lifes are becoming further digitized, I think it is very important to learn as much as we can on how these technologies function and how we can manipulate them, at the same time this is not something that we can expect from everyone in society, therefore I feel it is in a way a social duty for the nerdy ones in our society to share this information and help the people around us, be it in physical or digital proximity.
DF: You were a finalist for the Circa Prize 2025, which was extremely exciting. Can you share a bit about the process and some insight into the work you showed?
SS: Yes, I was quite excited and felt honoured to be part of such an impressive roster of finalists this year. I showed a re-edit of my film “Naufragio Liberador” (Liberating Shipwreck), which I talked about more in detail earlier. I focused especially on the digital artefacts of the scenes generated through gaussian splats, a new AI-based 3D scanning method. In a way, I saw these digital traces as imprints of the metaphysical, elements of our world only ancestral practices can interface with, and which research in speculative physics is trying to uncover.