ÆTHER — Re:birth Festival, Japan

In June 2024 RE:SORB staged ÆTHER at Re:birth Festival in Japan. Over the festival meadow, beams and volumetric forms of light were drawn through fog into a field that visitors walked into, and dancers performed inside the light.

The piece is part of RE:SORB’s ÆTHER series of walk-through holographic fog installations, which also played at the Festival of Lights Berlin 2024. Documented from the ground and by drone.

ÆTHER is one of a family of holographic lightfields the studio developed itself, alongside BEYOND, Depth/100 and Tessellation. The family works with volumetric light, water screens and layered fog to fabricate three-dimensional form in mid-air. At Re:birth the carrier was fog, so the forms stood in the open air over the meadow. The method needs no headsets, no glasses and no LED. What it produces is the illusion of near-infinite depth, and a space an audience can step into.

At night the field read as a bright blue volume over the meadow. The imagery was generative, and the installation ran with its own spatial sound.