Artist: Mariko Mori

Credit: NCSA/NASA/B. O'Shea (MSU) and M. Norman (UC San Diego) 

We created two animations for the Madame Butterfly Opera at La Fenice, Venice.

The first video animates the famous ten minute orchestral "intermezzo" of Madame Butterfly. We conceived of a journey through space, time, and scale. Beginning with the earth we journey forward to reach our galaxy colliding with another, this echoes the first act narrative of two bodies from distant lands coming together envisioning a new future. The video further continues to show the galaxies and supper clusters as shown by NASA digital simulations. A vision of the infinite number of stories and tragedies much like the one in the Madame Butterfly.

The butterfly video plays when Cio-Cio San commits Seppuku after learning of her husbands betrayal by marrying an American woman. She is reincarnated as a butterfly and meets her ancestors.