Everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

The European premiere of Yvette Mattern's stunning laser rainbow projection, From One To Many, will traverse Berlin's night sky over three evenings this February:

Tuesday 2 February, 19:15 - 23:00
Friday 5 February, 19:00 - 23:00
Saturday 6 February, 19:00 - 23:00

Presented as part of transmediale.10, the rainbow of seven parallel laser beams will shine across a three kilometre stretch of central Berlin, from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in the Tiergarten to the landmark Fernsehturm (TV tower) at Alexanderplatz. Over three nights of the festival, the rainbow will appear in the night sky and will be visible across the city as it rises diagonally from the roof of HKW to a point approximately 250 metres up the shaft of the TV tower.

Mattern conceived the project as a dramatic and luminescent symbol of social diversity, peace and hope. It has been shown only once before, just over a year ago in New York City, under the name Global Rainbow, where it shone across downtown Manhattan on the evening of 19 January, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In Berlin this February, during the 20th anniversary celebration of the reunification of Germany, it invokes its symbolism once more in connecting the city's House of World Cultures with the TV tower that formerly represented the pride of communist East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party.

The spectacular use of the latest high specification laser technology is particularly apt this year, the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser.

"From One to Many" is part of the exhibition, "Future Obscura". The exhibition brings together a group of diverse artworks which explore the complex condition of futurity through the lens of image-making., allowing us to peer into the "low light of the future".

Yvette Mattern is a Puerto Rican American visual artist who lives in Berlin and New York. Mattern works mainly in temporal media including video and film, which she fuses with elements of performance, public art and sculpture. Recently her work has been involved in exploring the concept of liminality. She has exhibited, screened, or performed at the Sternersen Museum in Oslo, Norway; ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany; WYSPA, Poland; The Kitchen, New York; ICA, Boston, USA; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, the 53rd Venice Biennale Official Satellite Program, and the Berlin Film Festival, and many other places.

Sponsored by laserfabrik showlaser GmbH, in cooperation with Allianz Kulturstiftung, and is produced in association with amino.