Transmissions across space and time drive the plot of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film ‘Solaris’, making and unmaking reality as they move. It begins anchored to the ground, depicting the last terrestrial day of its psychologist protagonist Kris Kelvin before he departs on an interstellar mission to investigate reports of strange happenings from a research space station orbiting the film’s titular planet. Upon arrival to Solaris Station, unexpected “guests” materialize in the airtight and claustrophobic enclosure. The origins of the apparitions are traced back to scientific experiments that directed X-rays towards the planet’s oceanic surface. Later into the film, Kelvin’s own brainwaves are beamed down, the seas start to swirl, and new beings are birthed from his memories. “This great examination of the limits of rationalism,” as Salman Rushdie once described ‘Solaris’, is great because of its realism. In fact, in a 1970 interview, Tarkovsky cited as motivation for making it his dissatisfaction with the “pretensions to truth”—first technological and next, as a result, psychological—of other sci-fi films. Tarkovsky understood that normative oppositions between reality and unreality are as false as those between technoscience and art. Fictions are founded in facts, and facts enlist fictions to propagate. In 2004, the industrial designer Marc Newson designed a concept jet-powered airplane and named it ‘Kelvin40’, after both the protagonist of ‘Solaris’ and his original namesake, the British baron who formulated the first two laws of thermodynamics. Aerospace had always been an influence for the designer, who rose to fame with his riveted aluminum Lockheed Lounge Chair and currently serves as the creative director of Qantas Airlines. But with the Kelvin40, he was able to move from citation to practice, resemblance to real thing. According to Newson’s website, the process was deeply“personal”—like with Tarkovsky’s protagonist, psychology meets thermodynamics and materializes into form. Words by @nicholaskorody.