Susanne Stemmer · Founder & Creative Director

I had been thinking about happiness. More precisely, about a story called The Search for Happiness. Because happiness is a funny thing. We spend an enormous amount of time looking for it — when quite often, it is right beside us.

Around the same time, ESERO Austria was celebrating an anniversary. They had seen Kinderklangwolke and approached Fossie about a possible collaboration. Space!  Well. That changed things.

Suddenly we were sitting in meetings with astrophysicists who spend their time finding ways to make children curious about the universe. We talked about planets, astronauts, space travel and what Earth looks like from very, very far away. After the first meeting, it was pretty clear: Our search for happiness was leaving the planet.

And suddenly, we had an entire universe to play with.

There really is a planet scientists believe may be rich in carbon and possibly diamond. So obviously our version had to be Lucy — fabulously glamorous, spectacularly self-absorbed and absolutely convinced that diamonds, wealth and making everybody else jealous were the secret to happiness. Lucy was very sure about this. The children were not.

When she returned towards the end of the show, the kids at the front actually booed her. We were thrilled. So was Lucy.

Then Earth herself dropped by. Terra was rather fond of all the different people living on her, quite happy to share her treasures — but she did have one small request: could we perhaps stop treating her as though she were indestructible? Fair point. 

And somewhere along the journey, our wonderfully peculiar Professor looked at Earth from space and noticed something else: No borders. None.

All those lines we humans get terribly worked up about — this is mine, that's yours, you stay over there, you're my enemy — simply aren't there.

The Professor found this rather ridiculous. So did the audience. That one got spontaneous applause.

And then, of course, there was the slightly less philosophical business of getting more than 4000 people to train like astronauts. Jumping jacks. Squats. Training. Singing. An entire crowd joining in. Which means the earworm is no longer exclusively our problem.

The music was composed by Titus Vadon, I wrote the lyrics — and the songs are now out there in the world to stream, should anyone wish to acquire the earworm voluntarily.

What I loved about working with ESERO Austria and Ars Electronica Center was that science didn't make the story smaller. Quite the opposite. Real planets, real space research and real questions gave us an even bigger playground for imagination, humour and some fairly serious thoughts hidden inside a lot of intergalactic nonsense.

And somewhere along that very long journey through the galaxy, Sun and Bun finally find what they had been searching for.

Not on a diamond planet. Not somewhere at the other end of the universe. It had been much closer than they thought.