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Falling Sideways

A planet has flung itself out of orbit to travel the universe alone. Seafoam Palace follows it underground, staging site-specific sound and light installations in abandoned resonating chambers across Europe and across the USA.

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Role: Creative technologist, developer, logistics
Dates: 2020 to 2026
Presented by: Seafoam Palace
Staged in: Berlin, Kraków, Tunisia, Estonia, and the USA

The vagabond planet

In a distant solar system, a planet has flung itself out of orbit and decided to pursue its own path. The remaining planets are trying to recapture it, casting a narrative lasso across the electromagnetic spectrum to draw it back into orbit.

But we like this vagabond planet. As we keep discovering tunnels where the lasso might trap it, we help guide it safely on its way. Each installation is a resonating chamber on the planet's path: a walk through interplanetary intrigue, a reverie on motion, a poetic dedication to forever falling sideways.

Falling Sideways is a branch of Seafoam Palace, a non-profit that stages immersive, scientific, site-specific work in ruined spaces.

A glowing white orb hovering in a carved salt cavern lit red, green and blue — The lensball in Saurau Chamber, Wieliczka, PL

The work

Tunnels, sewers and factories become the playground. I work with DMX, projection mapping, spatial audio and cymatics to turn negative spaces into a fragment of deep space, and build the apparatus that lets a planet speak.

These are not gallery spaces. The sites often come with no power, standing water and structures that are still coming apart. We bring the work in regardless, some of it through official channels, some of it by... quieter arrangement.

I make the apparatus that gives the planets a voice, and the website that ties the series together: inflatable lensball projection surfaces, an audio-reactive ferrofluid display, glowing rebar cast from EL wire and silicone, projection mapping cued to DMX lighting, and the site-specific movie screens, wiring and construction each tunnel needs. The eidophone, Faraday waves raised in water by the planets' own sound, does its work below.

A long abandoned tunnel washed in warm orange light, its rough walls receding into the dark — AEG Tunnel, Berlin

Capricorn, the Sea Goat

A ruined tunnel built in the shape of the Capricorn constellation, beneath the massive old AEG factory in Berlin. We have staged an installation there for three years running, with Berliner Unterwelten e.V., as part of the city's Long Night of Museums.

Inside, planetary echoes vibrate audio drivers that raise Faraday waves on an old overhead projector, throwing cymatic figures up onto the tunnel wall; a giant web of strings channels the voices of the planets; archaeological finds surface from the tunnel floor. Visitors move through in small groups, hundreds across a night.

A dark tunnel room webbed with taut strings lit blue and violet, a glowing point at its heart

A lit disc patterned with cymatic figures, salt and grit dancing on its surface

Visitors in a curved brick tunnel washed in magenta light, a cyan tube overhead and a warm orange glow at the far end

Visitors gathered in a narrow tunnel washed in deep purple light

Wieliczka Salt Mine

The world's deepest salt mine in Wieliczka, Poland is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Forty-one stories underground, each audience member was handed a piece of lithium to help hear the final dialogue between the two binary stars whose planet had gone rogue.

We soaked in the teachings of Copernicus and the Kraków astronomer Maciej Miechowita, exchanging pinpricks with billion-year-old subterranean rock and listening to two suns saying goodbye. The performance was organized by Marek Chołoniewski for the Audio Art Festival 2023 and hosted by the Wieliczka Salt Mine. I created the two lensballs, which began to talk to each other using LEDs, a microcontroller and a lot of bell wire (thanks Kim!).

A timber-framed passage framing a glowing orb deep in the salt mine

A magenta-lit cavern with a long staircase and figures descending

A lone silhouette in a hard hat standing against a huge luminous orb

An underground chapel of salt, a crystal chandelier above a red-carpeted aisle

Humboldthain and beyond

Falling Sideways keeps finding new chambers. In 2025 and 2026 the planet reached Humboldthain, a WWII flak tower in Berlin, for Roadside Picnic.

That is one slice of what Seafoam Palace has done with Falling Sideways. We have built resonating chambers in a graffiti-covered tunnel in Rhode Island, an abandoned train car near Hammamet on the Tunisian coast, the carved stone passages under Tallinn, and an abandoned factory in Texas. Each site is scouted, rigged and brought to life for a single night, then left exactly as we found it.

Roadside Picnic →

Silhouetted visitors in hard hats facing a lit, collapsed concrete ceiling hung with rebar — Humboldthain, Berlin

A glowing orb resting in a graffiti-covered tunnel, daylight showing at the far end — Rhode Island

A lone figure standing in a rough rock-cut chamber lit by a shaft of daylight from above — Hammamet, Tunisia

Three people crouched in a narrow carved-stone passage lit deep red and magenta — Tallinn, Estonia

A glowing orb printed with a starfield hanging from steel framing in a dark abandoned factory — Texas

Scouting

Each chamber begins the same way: a tunnel we step into not knowing what waits in the dark. These are tunnels from scouting missions over the years, each one measured for the day a planet might pass through it.

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