Mirage: Eigenstate
Commissioned by Gasworks, London.
On Mirage the series:
Riar Rizaldi’s films explore the roots and repercussions of modern science and advanced technology on the social, political, and cultural life of humans and nonhumans in Southeast Asia. His latest work is a dialogue between particle physics and ideas about the nature of God in tropical Sufi mysticism. It introduces the life and work of sixteenth-century Sumatran philosopher, poet, and Sufi mystic Hamzah Fansuri. In his writings, Fansuri conjectured that God infiltrates every aspect of the universe, down to the smallest particle, and the universe itself is God’s radiating holographic projection on a two-dimensional plane. Toward the end of his life, Fansuri was deemed a heretic and he and his disciples persecuted. His ideas, however, anticipated by several hundred years breakthroughs in particle physics—the notion that the universe is composed of subatomic particles including both matter and antimatter—as well as the holographic principle—the theory that the universe is, in fact, two-dimensional.
Episode 2
Duration 30'02"
The second episode, Mirage – Eigenstate (2024), weaves together analogous investigations into the nature of reality, positioning Western science as just one methodology among many in a constellation of pluralistic worldviews. The film explores different interpretations of reality, from Sufi mysticism and Monorealism to theories of quantum mechanics. Edited in the style of American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan’s 1980s television show, Cosmos, which sought to explain the origin of life and the fourth spatial dimension, Mirage – Eigenstate references scientific mass communication, where complex concepts are described in straightforward ways, often through images.
Film still
Installation view at Riar Rizaldi: Mirage, Gasworks, London, UK (2024).
Single-channel, 3:2 format, colour and sound (stereo), 30 min 02 sec, with built environment of aperiodic tiles floor made from Merapi volcanic ash and sand
Image courtesy of Gasworks. Photo by Dan Weill.
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Installation view at Riar Rizaldi: Mirage, HANGAR – Centro de Investigacao Artistica, Lisboa (2025).
Single-channel, 3:2 format, colour and sound (stereo), 30 min 02 sec
Image courtesy of HANGAR – Centro de Investigacao Artistica. Photo © João Beijinho.