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Watch: A Short Film on the Art of Discovery and How Ideas Are Shaped
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Filmmaker Elsa Wong and physicist Marc Ritter collaborated to create MOSS, a film exploring the similarities between scientific inquiry and artistic creation.
How does it feel to “do science”? This fundamental question guided the creation of MOSS, an abstract short film by physicist Marc Ritter and filmmaker Elsa Wong.
The film explores how knowledge accumulates: how our ideas are shaped by the natural world, the structures we inherit and the thinkers who came before us. Moving through themes of feedback, fragility and the boundaries that researchers must navigate, MOSS portrays discovery as an emotive craft, one that demands both a willingness to push into the unknown and the discipline to reduce complexity into something communicable. At its heart, the film asks what it means to engage in inquiry at all, including what we leave behind in order to see clearly.
To represent the transition from boundless complexity to structured frameworks, Wong and Ritter take the audience through a game of chess, visually navigating the boxes and boundaries that both researchers and artists must traverse in their career paths. The film employs double-exposed analog film to capture the process of finding patterns amid nature’s complexity.
This film was made as part of Symbiosis, a two-week program that pairs scientists with filmmakers to create short films. This year’s Symbiosis is aligned with the Simons Foundation’s Infinite Sums national initiative, which focuses on the beauty and ubiquity of mathematics.
Symbiosis is part of the Simons Foundation’s Researcher Engagement program, an initiative of the foundation’s Science, Society & Culture division. You can learn more and stream the films here.