Farewell to Solaris (23rd of October 2016)

"Farewell to Solaris", a composition inspired by Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" was made some fifteen years ago (... man ...), but I made a video for it a few days ago. The video can be viewed in the window above. I recommend that you listen to it with headphones or on good speakers, in high quality and full screen settings (icons in the lower right corner in the window above).

"Solaris" is a novel about life, about what life really is and can a whole ocean on a planet be a living being. But it is also a novel about love, about sorrow for those we lost and their returning to life. Namely, Solaris, a god-ocean-child has the ability to recreate the deceased loved ones from the minds of the scientists who study it. The thus created beings have intelligence and can comprehend that they are simulations. Terrible, but also exceptionally strong. Andrei Tarkowski filmed a phenomenal movie using Lem's novel as a template. Lem hated it. In 2002 Soderbergh created his own version, which was in my opinion also excellent.

I am not really a fan of SciFi novel, at least not in a fanatic extent which is so typical for the genre. This is perhaps somewhat unusual because I wrote something which could probably be characterized in this way. But Stanislaw Lem's works do not fit well in science fiction. I mean, they fit, but they are so much more that the genre classification makes no sense. Lem is too good for that.

Both music and video were inspired by Lems's "Solaris", but not literally. For example, Lem's planet Solaris is lit by two suns. I didn't particularly like the idea visually so I insisted on a planet with surface layer made exclusively of blue fluid (Lem's Solaris has also some islands scattered on the south hemisphere) and lit by a single sun which emits more or less white light.

Solaris, closeup view

Methods which were used to create the dynamics of the ocean surface (above and below) were taken from the project >> Drinking coffee by the seaside so I won't describe in detail here.

Solaris, a view from far away
We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that 'finis vitae sed non amoris', is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going?

- Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris"
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Last updated on 23rd of October 2016.