Spheres from Regis Hervagault on Vimeo.

...42000 HD frames at 50p for a duration of 14 minutes, this is my own little space opera inspired by the teachings from Anaxagoras of Clazomenae.

Using a variety of software including open source tools and custom scripting, i designed a mesmerizing spaceball choregraphy to evoke atoms, DNA, seeds, spirals, fractals, etc...
The first draft screened as a backdrop for the robotic and live music performance by URBAN ORCHESTRA at the city council during the new year celebration in 2008 meeting critical acclaim.

Here's the final director's cut with an updated soundtrack and tighter edits to fit my original vision...

Regis Hervagault

Anaxagoras (c. 500-428 BC) was born in the Ionian city of Clazomenae but he is the first Presocratic who activated in Athens. He seems to be the teacher of Pericles. Anaxagoras is the first philosopher before Socrates who brought in trial for impiety. But in contrast to Socrates, and probably with the political help of Pericles, he exiled and died in Lampsacus. He wrote a book in prose with the title On Nature.

Cosmogony
For Anaxagoras, in the beginning of the cosmos, there was not one but two principles all infinite and everlasting in nature: (1) Mind (Nous) and (2) the Primeval Mixture (Migma). In the beginning ‘everything was in everything’. The revolutionary formation of the cosmos started when the infinite ‘seeds’ (spermata) within the primeval mixture separated from the mixture by the motive power of Mind. Mind initiated the rotation of the ‘seeds’ resulting in the predominantly heavy parts coming to the center of the vortex and the subtler parts to the outer part encircling them.

The Seeds
The compact ingredients of the primeval mixture were an infinite number of ‘seeds’ such as the opposite qualities of the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold, the bright and the dark. The ‘seeds’ are not generated nor destroyed; they are the ultimate combined, indivisible, and imperishable elements, unlimited in number and different in shape, colour and taste, with each ‘stuff’ containing everything. Anaxagoras’ ‘seeds’ are not elemental principles, as in Empedocles, but aggregations of the homoiomeroi. Homoiomeria means that for any given substance, its greater ratio is comprised of an infinite number of smaller particles having the same nature as the whole (and thus of all particles in existence), included in all physical mixtures.

Nous
Mind (nous) is the motive force that initiated the primeval matter. Mind is completely separate from matter, the only exception to the universal criterion ‘everything in everything’. Matter under the control of Mind expands continually and indefinitely outwards from the original microdot which contained everything in the whole universe. Nous is described as ‘unlimited’, ‘self-controlling’, ‘unmixed’, ‘alone in itself and by itself’, ‘the finest’, ‘the purest’, ‘possessing complete knowledge’, ‘supreme in power’, ‘the controller of everything alive’.

Anaxagoras of Claxomanae