Pre-phase · starting July.
The work began online — in video calls per group, participants met their shared theme and gathered first associations, arriving in Schönbach with a common focus and first hypotheses in hand.

WEEK 1 FROM 2 – 7 AUGUST.
research, workshops & first production.
The first days were for arriving, forming groups, and sharpening questions. Alongside the project work ran open sessions and talks: 

Monday 3 August.
Image and glitch w/ ROSA MENKMAN. 
Menkman gave glitch art its vocabulary. Her Glitch Studies Manifesto reads the break in the flow as the moment a technology stops hiding and shows what it actually is. Her later work shifted from glitch to resolution — the more political question: setting a standard promotes order and efficiency and, in the same move, buries the alternatives that were never allowed to exist. She founded the institutions for Resolution Disputes (TRANSFER Gallery, New York), wrote The Glitch Moment(um) and Beyond Resolution, and won CERN's Collide International Barcelona Award, which sent her research toward what makes images im/possible. Since 2023 she runs the Im/Possible Lab at HEAD Genève. For a residency built on what an eclipse makes visible by hiding it, the sharpest possible opening — a talk on visible/invisible, glitch and ghosts, opening into shared questions. Find out more: beyondresolution.info

Monday 3 August.
Information Field Theory
w/ PD DR. TORSTEN ENßLIN (DZA / MPA Garching).
An evening talk on reconstructing signals and images from noisy, incomplete data, and on Enßlin's work on artificial intelligence and the manipulative communication of machines — whose simulations of communicating agents generated the text of the work The Observer Effect. The same evening opened with short introductions from Dr. Sylvia J. Zhu (DESY) and Dr. Konstancja Satalecka (DZA). 
Find out more: https://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~ensslin/

Tuesday 4 August, 
Jama: přichod [pit: future] sorbian/wendish realities and visions for futures,
w/ KAROLINE SCHNEIDER / KRAWC.
An introduction to the Sorbian world, focused on mythology, cosmogony, and the sun. Karoline was born in Bautzen, is Sorbian, and lives in Leipzig. Her work develops serbski futurizm — a Sorbian futurism oriented on critical futurisms like Afrofuturism rather than on preservation, asking what a minority looks like in its own future instead of only in its own past. Installation, video, ceramics, augmented reality; her solo show jama: pśichod / Grube: Zukunft ran at the BLMK Cottbus in 2026. Her artistic PhD examines cowrie shells on the harnesses of Sorbian Easter riders — a shell from the Indian Ocean on a horse in Lusatia, and the trade routes that put it there. Find out more: karolineschneider.me

Wednesday 5 August, Introduction to the CASUS research fields.
The CASUS researchers introduced their fields and the work of the centre: Dr. Rainer Wunderlich, Dr. Eduardo H. Colombo, Dr. Ismail Ismail and Lagan Dhanda on the theory of complex systems, with Philipp von Haymerle on the work of CASUS.

Thursday 6 August.
TouchDesigner
w/ LYNN MAYYA.
Lynn is a Syrian-born audiovisual artist based in Berlin, working at the NODE Institute — the TouchDesigner and VVVV hub. She studied Time Based and Interactive Media Art in Linz and performs generative real-time work, building environments where image and sound are made in the moment rather than played back. Her day came in two halves: the basics in the morning, from nothing; an open surgery in the afternoon for those already working in it. With several projects here leaning on real-time image systems, the practical spine of the first week. Find out more: lynnmayya.com

Thursday 6 August.
Ecological filmmaking with AI —
w/ FLORENT PALLARES & THOMAS VIVIEN from Film Spring Open France.
An introduction to ecologically oriented filmmaking with AI, led with Thomas Vivien — the content seed of the later German–Polish–French collaboration in the Film Spring Open network. Both work within FSO's interdisciplinary European education programmes, run under cinematographer Sławomir Idziak (Three Colours: Blue, Gattaca, Black Hawk Down, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Their strand pairs AI applied to audiovisual production with more ecological ways of working, taught through the Cinébus — a mobile, low-energy training studio that runs practical courses in Poland and France. The best participants from those courses are invited to the Film Spring Open Workshops in Kraków (13–22 October 2026), the network's large international lab. Find out more: filmspringopen.eu

Friday 7 August.
On Ancestral Technologies,
w/ TABITA REZAIRE, online from Guyane.
Rezaire lives in Cayenne, French Guiana, and works where technology, spirituality, ancestral knowledge, and cosmology meet — with no hierarchy between them. She tends Amakaba, a sacred forest in the Amazon organised around a garden of medicines, birthwork on the land, and collective starwork: a portable planetarium that remembers an astronomy older than the one we were taught. In 2026 she was part of In Minor Keys, the main exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale. Given two weeks spent pointing instruments at a sun about to be covered, a practice that keeps a planetarium for an older astronomy was not decoration on the programme — it was a second way of asking the same question. Online from Guyane, Find out more: tabitarezaire.com


OUR SCIENTIFIC GUESTS
FROM DZA, DESY & CASUS
The groups work alongside researchers connected to Lusatia and its emerging research landscape: 
Deutsches Zentrum für Astrophysik (DZA)/
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY & TU Dresden
DR. KONSTANCJA SATALECKA 
Multi-messenger astronomy — MAGIC, IceCube, CTA — and regional science communication.
DR. MIKE LINDNER 
Geophysics and seismology; the Low Seismic Lab and Lusatia's seismic quiet.
PD DR. TORSTEN ENßLIN, MPA Garching and DZA 
Information field theory, artificial and natural intelligence. His simulations of communicating agents, which produce self-deception and machine gossip, generate the text of one of the films made here.
DR. SYLVIA J. ZHU, DESY Zeuthen 
Gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and gravitational-wave sources; data sonification with artists.
JOHANNES WÜNSCHE (JAN WINŠA), TU Dresden · Einstein Telescope 
Doctoral researcher in elementary-particle phenomenology at the Institut für Kern- und Teilchenphysik (IKTP), TU Dresden; interviewed in Sorbian for Katja Hrjehorjec's work.

Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS),
an institute of Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR)
DR. EDUARDO H. COLOMBO 
Complex systems, theoretical ecology, and pattern formation — landscape heterogeneity as a lens that reveals the hidden.
DR. RAINER WUNDERLICH 
Complex systems; macroecology and species-distribution modelling.
DR. ISMAIL ISMAIL 
Theory of complex systems, Görlitz.
LAGAN DHANDA 
Theory of complex systems, Görlitz.
DR. JIŘÍ VYSKOČIL, formerly CASUS 
Physicist specialising in high-performance computing, simulation, and scientific visualisation — and an artist in his own right, resident for the full two weeks with his own project on cosmic structures.


WEEK 2 FROM 9 – 16 AUGUST.
field works, production, eclipse & premieres.
The second week shifted fully into making: filming, recording, building, cutting, paced toward 12 August, when the partial eclipse became both a shared event and a source of material. Shoots and excursions ran across the region — the open-cast landscapes near Jänschwalde and Turnow, an exploratory borehole for the Einstein Telescope, the Berzdorfer See, the Kühlhaus Görlitz. On 15 August the residency closed internally, the groups showing each other where the work had got to.


WED 12 AUGUST.
TSHBE! — THE SUN HAS BEEN EATEN!
19:18 first contact · 20:10 maximum, ~85 % · 20:29 the sun sets, still covered
Never night, but that wrong, tilted light where the colours go metallic, birds fall quiet, and insects start up as if someone had tampered with the clock. Not a viewing appointment but a day you walked through: from a flooded granite quarry, up through forest, across open slope, onto a mountain, and into the night.

Five stations, each named for a term from physics or cosmology, strung along one continuous path and filmed as a single unbroken take — sound, performance, and the sky itself folded into one movement. Free, public from the gathering point onwards. Dress code red. → find out more.

What else is SEAR?
Autumn & Winter 2026.
Once the eclipse phase was over, the focus turned to finishing and putting the work into the world: editing, sound design, and colour were completed, multichannel installations and performative formats tested, and the groups exchanged strategies for presentation and distribution. First public presentations began on 22 August — at the CASUS FOKUS Festival in Görlitz, alongside the CASUS Open Door Day. From there the work carried onward into the exhibition at Kunsthalle Görlitz (18 September – 3 October) and further festivals and science–art contexts, shown together with the scientists and communities involved.

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