A Black Hole Calling Us

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

A Black Hole Calling Us surrounds visitors with a ring of vertical screens displaying a real-time gravitational lensing simulation. Computed frame by frame, shaped by the same mathematics that describes how a black hole warps the space around it. No sound in space, but here there is. 12-channel audio soundscape pulls you in and spins around you.

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.

The n-body simulation underpinning parts of the work runs as a separate Python process, stepping gravitational forces and positions at a fixed time increment and outputting updated body states each iteration. This gave us precise, physically consistent orbital motion that we could feed into the visual system rather than animating by hand.

Soundscape is connected to the visual field so that detectable events in the audio affect the particle simulations and lensing fields. The sound of a spacetime event deforms the picture that represents it.

Developed in collaboration with the Niels Bohr Institute, Center of Gravity, and Yonder Art-Science. Shown at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, March – April 2026.