Author: Annie

Featured image taken from http://www.sydney.com/destinations/sydney/sydney-city/vivid-sydney

This June, I had the opportunity to visit the Vivid festival in Sydney, Australia – a 23-day annual outdoor exhibition that saturates the city center with colors, sounds and an explosion of the arts. The festival features artworks from artists, designers, engineers and makers across the world that turns the harbor rim of Sydney, including iconic public places such as the Opera House, Darling Harbor and Royal Botanic Garden, into an open gallery of the creative arts. A glimpse to the festival can be found here at http://www.vividsydney.com/.

Walking in the middle of tree-hung fairy lights among the buzzing crowd and passing a pulsating animation that was being projected onto the Customs House, I could not help but contemplate how much beauty in this world that was created with good engineering, fine ideas and the appreciation for the arts.

A favorite piece of mine in the midst of light and music is a small public furniture located by the Sydney’s Walsh Bay. The sculpture described a two-seat bench with soft, flowing curves, electronically lit with a smooth gradient of bioluminescence, the range of colors that can be found in creatures at the depth of the sea. However, as an enthusiastic visitor walked by and took the seat to look at the captivating harbor view, the surface of the sculpture where the body touched turned into a cool, bleaching white light. Designed and created by two UNSW student and alumni, Nila Rezaei and Nathan Adler, ‘Exterminia’, the name of the piece, depicts the effects of climate change on the coral reefs and the marine living system in general. Being an engineering student, I love this clever concept of introducing environmental awareness into architecture. The piece provoked thoughts. It gave the artwork meaning.

There would be other people who remembered other pieces of artwork because they connected to their personal experience, and spoke to them the way Exterminia did to me. But it is the connection and what it means to you that matters. Sometimes even the greatest artwork of the world would not matter to us as much as a happy birthday painting from your best friend, or hand-sewn dress that your mom made.

This brings back the thoughts I have had recently about people. That the substantiality of things in life lies in the message it conveys. And that we, I like to believe each of us is a piece of arts from the universe itself, are all trying to convey who we are and our uniqueness to the right kind of people, and if you concentrate on searching for that in the ones you met, you can see that people are simply substantial in their own ways.

*Featured image: Setting of “Constellations” – taken from Clarisza Runtung’s Facebook page

The lights dims, a girl and a boy walks through the aisle into the center circle. They are Marianne and Roland, and they tell the story of the two.

Constellations, written by Nick Payne, draws the enchanting life of a girl named Marianne, a physicist and Roland, a beekeeper who thinks she studies “something about space”. They both live in a multiverse – a world where “all decisions you make and don’t make coexist simultaneously”.

The multiverse is a concept of quantum mechanics, where many worlds exist depending on the choices made and actions taken. This interpretation implies that in every world contain a different variation of the life of a person, and the multiverse portrays all possible alternates of the past and the future, existing in parallel. It is described in the play’s accompanying note as many branches of a single tree, and reality is not simply a single footpath.

In many ways, Constellations reminds me of Déjà Vu. This bittersweet fairytale is delivered through various reiterations of the storyline, and the play proceeds to portray one particular course of actions that leads to their relationship and forms their life together. There are many times that Marianne and Roland almost would not have met each other, or would not have known each other, because of the little cues in what they say or their state of mind at the time, or the way they choose to deal with the situation, and their alternate choices would have taken part and existed in another universe. To think about it, the combination of actions that would lead to where they are right now is quite rare.

But Constellations is not just a story of physics. Far from that, it is also a love story. Because through all the randomness of the dice, they learn to live with the present. Even in a multiverse, there is no way to tell if one’s course of actions is better than another, because one does not know what the future will lead to. Every choice you make is the right choice, or that you build it into the right choice, because that is what we do as our responsibility to make us happy. One of the ideas that resonates with me most is the time you have with someone, that there are no more or less time to spend with another person if you learn to appreciate in the present, or to put it in the words of a character from my favorite book – Hazel’s words from The Fault in Our Stars, that even though “some infinities are bigger than other infinities […] I cannot tell you how grateful I am for our little infinity”!