Toni Dove’s Ode to Storytelling and Sci-Fi
WRITTEN BY SAHER PRAKASH
Learning is work. And it’s made easier when you’re invested in a story. You know that feeling after finishing a book where you long for more? Where you can’t shake the impossible desire to actually see these characters, even speak to them. You daydream about their world and what you learned from it, even how you might fit into it.
Hollywood makes billions off these desires every year, adapting written works into visual media. Stories move from the publishing industry to the media industry. And sadly, the deeper we crawl into the digital age, the less written work enters our consciousness. We do our learning on the internet and call it browsing. We shorten stories and glue words to videos and call it social media. Young children can learn about “science” from AI stick figures. These days, learning is searching for a form with no name.
But what do you call it when you’re reading a book, then you turn the page and it becomes a video or a hologram jumping out of the page, then you turn the page and you’re back to reading? What might the name be for such a fluid storytelling tool? Immersive? Experimental? Transitional? Toni Dove would call it Sunjammer 6: an augmented reality book, where the pages come alive through digital technology. The story extends further as it moves between installation, performance, and writing, where characters greet you and walk you through their world, literally. The Fieldworks team visited Dove’s studio to learn about her project.
At the center of Sunjammer 6 are two characters separated by centuries – Hypatia, the ghost of an ancient teacher and philosopher, and Kepler, a future inventor working on an off-world power station for sustainable energy. Their worlds collide ten years into our future, where the remnants of the carbon fuel industry meet the growing recreational spaceflight industry. Through their encounter, Dove builds a science fiction world that is not so far removed from our own.
Hypatia is based on a real historical figure – a mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer who lived in Alexandria, Egypt around 360 CE. She was one of the earliest known women in her field, attracting large audiences with her renowned lecturing. She was a teacher at a time when knowledge and intellectual life were under threat – a time of deep political and religious unrest. Sadly, she was murdered by rogue christian monks in 415 who associated her philosophies with Paganism.
Dove draws on Hypatia’s story as a way to think about the loss of knowledge and the forces that threaten those who teach it.
When political unrest ensues and a fear of knowledge takes over, the teachers of the world lose out and learning becomes a commodity with which we must become inventive to succeed at.
Hypatia’s presence in the book is compelling. She appears as a visitor from another time, searching for people willing to listen and learn. Upon activation of the book’s AR, she speaks to you, “I am Hypatia, a visitor, from the depths of time…Come on! Tell your story,”. Her voice, performed by Dove herself, has an urgency to it. She may sound angry, but also carries a sense of curiosity and this…desperation. A desperation I can only imagine is one of a teacher simply trying to find someone who will engage with the age-old knowledge she has to share.
Kepler, meanwhile, brings the story into the future. He’s an inventor trying to build a new energy system while navigating the remnants of an old one. Dove doesn’t leave the science out of her science fiction, either, especially as she is currently Artist in Residence of the Yale Quantum Institute. Her world draws on ideas like Platonic solids, Kepler’s laws (of the historical figure Johannes Kepler), and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I found myself learning new things simply by following the characters and trying to understand the world they inhabit. In the interview, we concurred that that’s what makes Sci-Fi so exciting – you become invested in a story while learning about a world that, in some way, reflects your own.
Aside from the didactic nature of the book’s genre, there is the immersive experience of reading Sunjammer 6. While I flipped through the book myself, I felt like a child with one of those sensory books, satisfying my visually hungry brain. A page might begin with text, then you can open into a moving image, a voice, or a character who seems to occupy the space in front of you. Each augmented reality page works almost like a “tiny movie” as Dove describes it, and together they build a larger one. You’re still reading, but you’re also watching, listening, and interacting.
There is a fluidity to the ever transitioning experience – a fluidity that applied the visual of Hypatia herself. Dove describes her as “clothed in the artifacts of her own movement.. So she’s basically made up of motion.” Her physical form is not separate from the story; it is part of how the story is told and how world building is achieved.
Dove describes accomplishing this project as the task of bringing “vocabulary to the visual” To her, the process felt like “learning yet another new language” so that it feels like more than just a book with some tech. That motivation is especially fitting for an artist whose work has long moved between different forms. Dove shared that her work often feels like one continuous project, as if she is constantly world building in her own sci-fi-adjacent genre.
Harvestworks has been a place where Dove was able to experiment with new ways of bringing stories into physical space. Her earlier work with holograms and projects like Mesmer pushed at the boundaries of what a book or an image could be. In Mesmer, the texture and shimmer of the book created an almost otherworldly engagement with the eyes. With Sunjammer 6, she continues that interest in transforming the experience of looking, reading, and interacting with an image.
For all intensive purposes, Sunjammer 6 could exist as an album, a play, an installation, or a performance. In fact, it already sort of does. The story is not confined to one medium. Each version offers another way to encounter its characters and ideas. What I believe makes this multimedia approach so essential is that it allows for as many people as possible to connect with a story.
During our studio visit, we got a glimpse of how the story operates beyond the book. The installation uses fourteen speakers arranged as a chandelier, with projections on either side of a screen. Hypatia can move around the screen, and the sound follows her. In the installation version, she is caught in a time loop, repeatedly trying to escape before being thrown back into it. This loop is where the larger story begins, like a prologue for the book.
There’s also a performance that builds on that the sense of movement Dove instilled in Hypatia’s animation, using dancers and the body to give the story another physical dimension. There’s even a meet-and-greet experience, where Hypatia can move with you, speak, listen, and respond. The figure might choose one person from a group to interact with. It’s an unpredictable encounter with a character who, rather than remaining on the page, gets to meet her audience, or rather, the people she wishes to be her students.
Across these forms, Dove is continually finding new ways to bring people into the same world. The technology is inventive, but what makes it meaningful is the story it helps tell. We don’t just learn about Hypatia or Kepler by reading information about them. We get to spend time with them, hear their voices, follow their movements, and become curious about the worlds they inhabit.
Maybe that’s one of the best ways to learn: to become invested enough in a story that you want to keep going. Sunjammer 6 offers a new avenue into that investment, letting a story move off the page and into the space around us. And when the experience ends, you’re left with the same feeling you might have after finishing a good book: wanting to know more, and wishing you could stay in that world a little longer. But this time, you can.
Check out Sunjammer 6 in action
Sources
“Her Story.” Chandra X-ray Observatory, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, https://chandra.si.edu/women/story.html. Accessed 4 Nov. 2026.
“Hypatia.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hypatia. Accessed 4 Nov. 2026.
Dove, Toni. Interviews by the FIELDWORKS team. 11 Aug. 2026 and 30 Oct. 2026.