Stunning 3D Water Projection: Monad at Vivid Sydney

A stunning 3D water projection merging philosophy, spirituality & modern day technics to create a multisensory experience. Monad was my favourite piece from the annual Sydney Vivid Light Festival. 

For aeons, the circle has been revered as a symbol of endless life and equilibrium. Pythagoras declared it a perfect shape and a symbol of 'Monad' - a divine, all-encompassing force.

Projected onto a mist of water from a series of jets, Monad floats as a 3D display mid-air. These technics help conjure wonder at nature & the ongoing rhythm of the universe.

In order to create something out of nothing you need fundamental rules & guiding principles to guide the propagation of life, diversity & expression. Our universe is fundamentally geometric & fractally infinite in dimensionality. From the circle comes the triangle, the square & all the countless fundamental platonic solids from there forth.

This work reminds me of the inherent divinity, order & mystery that powers our material interface. When you see beyond the interface, behind the veil, you see the hyperdimensional geometry.

Yet even that is an overlay over fundamental Awareness. In order for life to propagate you need to create polarity, relativity, differentiation, for if you are everything then you are also nothing.



Monad from Greek monas 'unit' an elementary individual substance that reflects the order of the world from which material properties are derived. The term was first used by the Pythagoreans as the name of the beginning number of a series, from which all following numbers derived. Giordano Bruno described three fundamental types: God, souls & atoms.

The idea of monads was popularized by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Monadologia (1714). In Leibniz’s system of metaphysics, monads are basic substances that make up the universe but lack spatial extension & hence are immaterial. Each monad is a unique, indestructible, dynamic, soullike entity whose properties are a function of its perceptions & appetites. Monads have no true causal relation with other monads, but all are perfectly synchronized with each other by God in a preestablished harmony. The objects of the material world are simply appearances of collections of monads.

Anastasia Isachsen creates video & light art for various cultural projects.

See the poem this work inspired me to write: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PzvbqyQOKFo