A Black Hole Calling Us

A black hole is invisible, only the light it bends tells you it is there.

Viewed from above, the art installation forms a circular constellation of LED screens, tracing the event horizon: the boundary around a black hole beyond which nothing - not even light - can escape.

In A Black Hole Calling Us, the black hole becomes both a scientific object and a philosophical proposition. The work invites visitors to contemplate the limits of human perception and knowledge, using the physics of black holes as a lens through which to reflect on our place in an expanding and largely unknowable universe.

The installation surrounds visitors with a ring of vertical screens displaying a real-time gravitational lensing simulation. Audience is captured by a depth camera and then put into the experience. Being stretched, tworn apart, split into dimentions and warped. All made with Touchdesigner TOPs and GLSL TOPs and driven by our custom timeline preset system. Making the experience circular and contentious. A 12-channel soundscape that draws visitors inward, circling and enveloping them.

We built the visual entirely in TouchDesigner, using Blender for asset preparation. The core challenge was producing physically-grounded lensing in real time across a multi-screen setup. We developed the rendering around a GPU shader pipeline. A low-resolution deflection map is computed each frame and used to warp the background image, composited over procedural layers. Because the lensing field is spatially smooth, computing it at reduced resolution and upsampling introduces no visible loss, which kept the pipeline within real-time budget on the available hardware. Both particle effects and video effects are connected to the soundscape, so that peaks in the audio levels will be reflected in the visual side of the work.

A Black Hole Calling Us was developed in collaboration with researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, Center for Gravity, and Yonder Art-Science, Copenhagen.

The work was first shown at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum and has subsequently been presented at MAPS – Museum of Art in Public Spaces (September 2026) and TRAPHOLT – Museum of Modern Art and Design (December 2026).