Between acts, the house lights dim but the stage does not go dark. Instead, an immense sky fills the projection screen at Bayerische Staatsoper—a sky that is almost real but not quite, swirling with a billion motes of color that drift and collide in slow hypnotic loops. The audience sits inside it. No performers, no narrative, no text—only atmosphere pressing against the architecture of the theater. That suspension between acts is the space I was asked to inhabit, and the question it posed was whether a synthetic sky could carry a psychological charge that real weather does not.

Abramović conceived 7 Deaths of Maria Callas as an opera in which film dominates the stage—roughly eighty percent moving image, twenty percent live performance. My role was the visual intermezzos: abstract skies projected at monumental scale between each of the seven death scenes. Each sky had to establish the psychological condition of the death that followed. The strangulation scene demanded a claustrophobic atmosphere, a toxic color that tightened around the viewer. The scene where Tosca leaps from the parapet required a vertiginous sky, an abyss opening upward rather than below.

I wanted to produce something impressionistic rather than photographic—atmosphere that behaved like painting, not like weather simulation. The process began with analog cloud tanks and macro photography, the kind of practical atmosphere-making behind Kobayashi’s Kwaidan and the stargate sequence of Kubrick’s 2001. Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves was another early reference: computer-generated skies functioning as painted intermezzos between sections of the film. But the scale of the opera demanded a digital language: particle simulation, a billion particles per sky, each governed by physical parameters, colliding and interacting until the results resembled Turner’s hyper-real skies more than any meteorological record. Turner understood that atmosphere painted beyond observation becomes a site of psychological projection—and that was precisely the territory I was after.

What interested me was the uncanny valley applied not to human figures but to nature. The term usually describes the disquiet when a simulated human face is almost real but perceptibly wrong. I wanted each intermezzo to produce a parallel disquiet: a sky that looked almost natural but carried a psychological charge that real weather does not. We increasingly inhabit synthetic environments—screens, algorithms, generated landscapes—where the boundary between the natural and the manufactured erodes without announcement. The opera house concentrates that condition: the displacement between recognition and unease is where the work operates.

This was my second opera collaboration with Abramović, after Pelléas et Mélisandee (2018), where I projected NASA Hubble imagery across a seven-meter concave disc—a kind of cosmic eye—at Opera Vlaanderen. That earlier work dealt in cosmic distances; 7 Deaths brought the scale closer, down to weather and atmosphere. In both cases the moving image is not accompaniment but environment—it occupies the space rather than illustrating the story. That is really what I have been working through across everything I do: how a projected image builds a psychological environment, not just a picture. In the Megaplex trilogy, that environment is mythological. In Heaven’s Gate, it is purgatorial. Here, it is meteorological: each sky a diagnosis rendered in color, pressure, and particle density.

Working in opera clarified something about the performing arts that the conventional art world sometimes obscures. Most of my work starts with a musical idea, and to work alongside composers, directors, and performers in service of a shared vision is a complete joy. There is no aspect of making something for the sole purpose of being sold—a condition, by now, embedded in virtually everything we do. The intermezzos exist in relation to music, to Abramović’s staging, to the singers, to the audience’s breath between acts. They do not stand alone, and that dependence is what gives the atmosphere its charge. The sky means nothing by itself—it means something because someone is about to die beneath it.

Marco Brambilla