Cosmic Sinkhole

Cosmic Sinkhole is a little universe in which you lose yourself. The name says it all: whoever stands beneath it is drawn in and stays. The dance of the lights pulls you inward, until the rest of the world disappears for a moment.

32 individually built planets float in three concentric orbits, driven by over 4,600 addressable LEDs. No planet is like any other: each one is marbled and painted by hand, every acrylic disc colored differently – a field of pure one-offs that looks completely new depending on the angle and the effect. Across the three orbits, lights travel, circle, drift, and dissolve into one another.

At the center sits the ring-node – the sun of this system. A large disco-ball core that Tina Reuter (Hampelkammer) covered mirror by mirror in painstaking detail. Wrapped in fog and roaming spotlight, it throws thousands of reflections into the room and gives the installation its pulsing heart.

The whole thing – around 80 kg – is held by steel cables strung between two trees. A 1-meter steel ring forms the structural and technical heart: this is where the “brain” sits, from here the cables run outward like a star to the individual planets, and the 3-meter outer ring is tied to a central point by steel cables. The real challenge was above our heads: to get the load-bearing cables into forked branches more than ten meters up, we shot them up with a large slingshot – the trees protected with tree slings, the entire rigging secured together with an industrial climber and his equipment. Whether it would all work was uncertain beforehand. But because I’d been able to fully assemble and test the frame on my parents’ attic in advance, setup and teardown on site went off smoothly.

Cosmic Sinkhole is controlled via four WLED controllers over Art-Net, plus two DMX spotlights and a controllable disco motor that keeps the ring-node in motion. The installation is modular and adapts to different spaces and occasions – whether a forest dancefloor, a club, or an exhibition.