The Conic Sections of Love
Toni Dove likes to entice people into spending time around ideas they might not normally spend time with. Her latest work, Sunjammer 6: A Tale Blown by a Solar Breeze, is a love story told in the language of mathematics between the ghost of Hypatia—the Hellenistic astronomer and philosopher murdered in 415 CE—and Kepler Redux, a NASA engineer of the future building an off-world solar station. It is staged with 14 speakers, six cameras and three translucent projector screens. There's also an augmented-reality 3D book.
Like many of Dove's works, time-travel in Sunjammer 6 is both a genre and a metaphor. Hypatia wasn't part of Dove's original plan. Her name simply flew into Dove's head. But the more she researched the Hellenistic astronomer and philosopher, the more she saw echoes of the present in Hypatia's world—and in her violent death at the hands of a mob.
Her death sent ripples throughout the ancient Greek world, and Dove sees resonance in the present: a moment when higher education and research can be undermined and the value of knowledge diminished in a culture increasingly shaped by fear and the pursuit of profit. "The piece, for me, became very much about the consequences of the fear of knowledge. It's also a lot about how we think about things that are intangible in some way: abstract systems that human beings create to understand the world, such as mathematics and physics.
When Hypatia and Kepler meet, they negotiate the space and time between them and attempt to collaborate to push back against an encroaching dark age. But Dove doesn't tell their story in a single form, or through a traditional plot.
Instead, Sunjammer 6 unfolds across three interconnected experiences. In the installation, proprietary AI allows Hypatia to interact with multiple audience members, follow them around the triangular screen structure, respond to them, then losing interest, to talk to somebody else. "The ultrasonic speakers that deliver sound feel like somebody's whispering in your ear," Dove explains. In a 40-minute performance, dancers interact with the installation, becoming, in Dove's words, "avatars for the audience." An augmented reality book based on the show extends the story into yet another dimension.
Why tell the story this way?
Dove, who is a 2026/27 artist resident at Yale Quantum Institute, is an instrument builder who has been working with emerging technologies for over 30 years. She is interested in the technologies that are transforming the world we live in. "The process of working with them is part of what makes me understand how they work, what their impact is, what the thinking is behind them and how I want to engage with them, or how I don't want to engage with them," she says. The machines she builds become a way to tell a story and explore how a story can be told. In Sunjammer 6, that means creating myriad ways to encounter the same characters and ideas.
But beneath all these technologies is an old-fashioned structure: a love story. Dove built the story around Hypatia's relationship to mathematics and education, using as its structural arc one of mathematics' oldest concepts: the conic sections.
A conic section is created when a flat plane slices through a cone. Change the angle of the cut and you get a different curve, an ellipse, a parabola or a hyperbola. Dove was intrigued by the fact that these figures are two-dimensional, but can only be fully understood when seen in relation to a third dimension. That idea became part of the way she approached Sunjammer 6: using the theme of mathematics to connect different dimensions of time, perspective and experience.
"I pulled this thread through these different moments in time where different mathematical figures—Hypatia, 16th-century German polymath Johannes Kepler, and the future NASA engineer—have different references to the conic sections," Dove says. "I wanted the love story to be described in the language of mathematics. So that the two things could wrap around each other."
In Sunjammer 6, mathematics isn't simply something the characters study or talk about. It becomes a language for understanding their relationship, for connecting their characters across time—and a way of asking what might become visible when we change our perspective.
As Hypatia says, "there is nothing static about numbers, nothing passionless about gravity or the sun or algebra."