“Planetary Vision”
on view at the
Venice Biennale
Our short film, “Planetary Vision”, is on view at the Palazzo Diedo in the exhibition “The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology”—part of the 2025 Venice Biennale. Director Peter Galison narrates this meditation on the creation of an Earth-scale radio telescope to observe unimaginably distant blackholes.
Peter Galison, Robert Gerard Pietrusko, and myself have collaborated on a short film specifically for the Venice Biennale that meditates on the coordination of multiple radio telescopes around the world to create an Earth-sized “camera”—a transformation of our planet into an instrument for “seeing” far beyond our own Milky Way galaxy. Our film serves as a preview for our entry in the inaugural edition of the interactive Antikythera journal, an MIT Press publication.
The large rear-projection monolith screen featuring our swirling “Planetary Vision” title card just prior to the exhibition opening in Venice.
Our short film is 6 minutes and 30 seconds, composed of various diagrammatic animations, simulations, and footage of terrestrial radio telescope arrays. Peter’s narration binds these elements together into a brief narrative arc—from our own planet’s surface to orbits beyond. (Out of respect for my fellow collaborators, the venue, and the biennale, I am declining to post a copy of our work while it is on view in Venice.) Our film is featured on the exhibition’s 8m × 4.5m (26ft × 14.7ft) rear-projection “monolith” screen alongside works from Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden & Vinca Kruk), Gašper Beguš, Alexander Mordvintsev, and the experimental rock band Xiu Xiu.
The Edge of All We Know
Our work is based on Peter’s 2020 documentary, “Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know” (known as “the Black Hole film”) which chronicles the effort to capture the very first image of a black hole using the Event Horizon Telescope—a global array of radio telescopes that work together to create one virtual telescope the size of Earth.
Poster art for Peter Galison’s “Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know” (2020).
Peter has been a key figure in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, particularly in its philosophical and historical aspects. He is the director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, which is closely linked to the EHT. He is also involved in the development of the next-generation EHT (ngEHT) and the Black Hole Explorer—an expansion of the EHT to include extraterrestrial satellites.
Attribution
- Director / Producer. Peter Galison.
- Contains excerpts from “Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know” (2020), directed and produced by Peter Galison, edited by Chyld King.
- Designers & Animators. Robert Gerard Pietrusko, Stewart Smith, Scott March Smith, Adam Kai Ng, Garry Waller.
- Music. Zoë Keating “The Last Bird,” Into the Trees (2010), courtesy of Zoë Keating, mixed by Count.
- Associate Producer. Lukas Gianocostas.
- Soundscape. Robert Gerard Pietrusko.
- Data Sonification. Daniel Palumbo.
Exhibition context
Our “Planetary Vision” short film is included in “The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology”—curated by Benjamin Bratton (Antikythera), Nicholas de Monchaux, (MIT Architecture), and Ana Miljacki (MIT Architecture). This exhibition is on view at the Palazzo Diedo in Venice, Italy from 10 May 2025 until 23 November 2025. It is a component of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the 2025 Venice Biennale. The Antikythera think-tank is supported by the Berggruen Institute whose subsidiary Berggruen Arts & Culture is headquartered within the Palazzo Diedo.
The exterior of the Palazzo Diedo in Venice, Italy on the opening night of “The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology.” The large monolith screen is visible through the palazzo’s entrance; the colors from inside reflecting on the waters outside.
Berggruen Arts & Culture
The Palazzo Diedo venue is operated by Berggruen Arts & Culture (a subsidiary of the Berggruen Institute)—the building having been purchased by the institute’s namesake collector and philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen in 2022. After two years of restoration under the supervision of the Silvio Fassi studio, the palazzo opened to the public in April 2024, coinciding with the 60th Venice Biennale. Our exhibitions comes just after the first anniversary of this venue’s opening.
Berggruen Arts & Culture (BAC) aims to deepen the connection between contemporary art and the past, and between East and West. It hosts artist residencies, exhibitions, events, film and performance across five levels and a total area of 4,000 square meters. BAC describes this present exhibition as a “special project” and has issued the following press release:
Berggruen Arts & Culture, in collaboration with Antikythera and MIT Architecture, are pleased to announce the exhibition “The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology”, a Collateral Event at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
Bringing together two leading research initiatives, Antikythera’s “The Noocene: Computation and Cosmology from Antikythera to AI” and MIT Architecture’s “Climate Work: Un/Worlding the Planet”, this exhibition confronts urgent questions about our planet’s future and the role of architecture in shaping it. Between the cosmic reality of our planet and the ways in which we construct our understanding of it, The Next Earth fosters a dynamic conversation about our current ecological moment and the futures we must begin to imagine. By juxtaposing and synthesizing planetary computation and climate-conscious architectural practice, the exhibition challenges its visitors to rethink the scale and span of human action in relation to Earth’s systems.
Spanning two floors, The Next Earth stages a conversation between Antikythera’s and MIT Architecture’s current research on climate, cosmology and computation. While Antikythera examines the Earth as an evolving megastructure, through artifacts from the winding history of early Modern philosophy, astronomy and cosmology, MIT Architecture presents a kaleidoscope of thirty-seven different takes on what it has meant and what it might mean to practice with an eye to the planetary ramifications of architecture and design.
Visitors crowd into the Palazzo Diedo in Venice, Italy for the opening night of “The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology”—passing the exhibition’s prominent branding and curatorial texts.
The Antikythera think-tank
The ground floor of the palazzo is devoted to Antikythera’s portion of the exhibition, “The Noocene: Computation and Cosmology from Antikythera to AI.” The exhibition’s curatorial text places our contributed artifacts into a context of planetary awakening.
The Noosphere is the stratum of thought rising from Earth’s physical and biological layers as matter grows cognitive and partly self-aware. This planetary intelligence terraforms the planet, birthing the paradoxical Noocene: just as mind grasps its own ascent, it sees that victory might imperil its future. Computation and cosmology frame this doubleness, giving the epoch tools to read and redirect itself. Since the Antikythera mechanism (c. 200 BC), artificial computation has been cosmological instrumentation—simultaneously calculator and compass. Yet even with unmatched astronomical precision, what these numbers mean for Earth’s next composition remains undecided. Within The Next Earth, the Noocene exhibition braids that ancient device with emergent AI—“fire apes making rocks think fast”—into a fragmentary portrait of human, machinic, and planetary intelligence.
The Antikythera think-tank (which produces the Antikythera journal), is directed by philosopher Benjamin Bratton. who is also Visiting Faculty Researcher in the Paradigms of Intelligence Research group at Google.
The Antikythera journal
The Antikythera think-tank, in collaboration with MIT Architecture and MIT Press, has created the new Antikythera journal—an annual digital publication, available at https://journal.antikythera.org as seen here:
The Antikythera journal emphasizes collaboration between writers and designers. Its inaugural volume (2025) explores the scope of planetary computation—the evolution of intelligence, global dynamics of simulation, existential technologies, diverse expressions of modular cognition, natural history of automation, informational theories of life, challenges of inhuman thought, emergence of physical AI, and the deep history of planetary sapience.
Our article, coming soon
Part One of Antikythera, Volume 2025 was made available in concert with the opening of the exhibition in Venice. Our full article on using Earth itself as an instrument for observing distant black holes (Galison, Pietrusko, myself, et al.) will launch with Part Two this autumn. Stay tuned.