The McNay Art Museum will present a sci-fi love story, interacting with virtual characters across time, in Toni Dove’s "Sunjammer 6: A Tale Blown by a Solar Breeze." The mixed reality installation combines sculpture, installation, cinema, and performance in a narrative that weaves ancient history, mathematics and astronomy with imagined futures.

The pioneering multimedia artist uses a custom-built interactive system that combines machine learning, skeletal tracking and multi-channel audio to respond to participants in real time. When visitors enter the exhibition, they activate the process and are drawn into another dimension. Cameras track movement, allowing a virtual character to react to their presence.

In the dreamlike installation, visitors meet Hypatia and Kepler Redux. Hypatia (ca. 355-415 CE) was a mathematician, philosopher and astronomer. An influential teacher and intellectual leader in Alexandria, her life and violent death by a religious mob have come to symbolize the fragility of knowledge and intellectual freedom. In this story, she appears as a furious ghost and encounters Kepler Redux, a NASA engineer 10 years in the future building an off-world power station.