2007, 32 min., color & BW, Czech, super 8

A collaborative film with Viola Ježková that maps Prague through seven zodiac constellations, turning the city into a listening surface and a provisional sky chart. Using specially modified theremins as instruments for sensing the invisible, we tried to place the sky on the ground, catching stray radio transmissions, electromagnetic traces, and the movement of bodies in space, in order to give visible and audible form to what normally remains distant and unseen.

We took a map of a city in the heart of Europe and placed on the table the city we live in:

A black line marked the limits of the smallest metropolis in the world:

Within those limits, the largest possible circle was found and drawn:

The circle became a map of the sky with seven zodiac constellations visible during the year in the Northern Hemisphere — Virgo, Leo, Taurus, Aries, Gemini, Pisces, and Cancer:

The sky map was then superimposed onto a circular section of the map of Prague:

The seven brightest stars of the constellations indicated seven “ears” of the zodiac, the film’s shooting locations. We found the sky on Earth:

Why “ears”? We wanted to make a sound and image map of our city that would somehow reflect a stellar order, somehow placing the sky onto the Earth. We had a microphone, a super 8 camera, and two theremins, which we used as devices for catching genius loci.

What is a theremin? It is the first fully electric musical instrument, an early synthesizer built by Léon Theremin in the first years of the newly established Soviet Union. It was originally designed as a device for sensing movement in space. It works through radio waves, so it sometimes captures not only changes in the field caused by nearby objects, but ordinary radio transmissions as well.

Using long wires, we slightly adapted the instruments so they would function more like “space catchers.” We made a film about the outskirts of Prague. Its soundtrack is composed of conversations, urban atmospheres, accidentally intercepted radio broadcasts, and above all the theremin sound, which changes from one star-determined location to another.