Throughout 2025, Dea Curić documented the sunsets from her hometown of Poreč, Croatia.

Her idea was to extract the most present colours from each month and create a kind of sunset colour wheel. Five colours for every month. Sixty across the year.

The palettes were the result of a much longer exploration of colour, perception and data — and an attempt to capture something that ultimately refused to be captured.

The more sunsets Dea documented, the more their colours seemed to escape definition. Weather changes them. Light changes them. Particles in the atmosphere change them. And even when we are looking at the same sky, we don't necessarily see the same colour.

What started as an attempt to capture the sunset became a record of how difficult it is to contain one.

MASEUN begins where that experiment ended.

What if those captured colours could be made fleeting again?

A sunset is never a still image. It changes from minute to minute. Colours appear, dissolve into one another and disappear. Look away and the sky you return to is already different.

And we don't experience it passively. Our eyes move through it — jumping between colours, following the brightest part of the sky or noticing something barely visible at its edge. Someone standing beside us may be looking somewhere else entirely.

So rather than using Dea's sixty colours to reconstruct the sunsets she saw, MASEUN uses them to generate new ones.

Choose a month and its five colours are released into a continuously blended field. Their positions, proportions and relationships are different with every generation.

And even after a sunset appears, it never becomes still.

Its colours continue to drift and blend, slowly changing the image — and the instrument — beneath your hands.

The source remains fixed.

The sunset does not.

No two generated sunsets are exactly the same, just as no two encounters with a real one are.

Turning colour into sound is not new.

What matters here is not giving each colour a sound, but preserving the relationships within the colour data as sound.

There is no natural musical note hidden inside a digital colour. Instead, MASEUN reads several properties of every colour it encounters and translates each of them into a corresponding property of sound.

Hue becomes pitch.
Chroma becomes timbre.
Lightness becomes sonic brightness.

And the system does not simply assign sixty colours to sixty notes.

As the five source colours of a month blend across the screen, they produce countless colours in between. The exact colour at any given point is calculated continuously, and its properties are translated in real time.

One mapping system is shared across the entire year. The relationships between the source colours are preserved, while their differences are expanded into a musical range the ear can meaningfully perceive.

It is not an attempt to reveal what a colour “really sounds like”.

It is a way of making relationships within colour audible.

The data generates the sunset.

The sunset becomes an instrument.

You compose the music.

Rather than translating an image into a finished soundscape, MASEUN waits for someone to move through it.

The exact colour beneath you determines what you hear. Your path determines the sequence. Your speed shapes rhythm and dynamics. Stop moving, and the instrument becomes silent.

But the sunset doesn't stop with you.

While you move through it, its colours continue to move beneath you. The instrument you are playing is therefore never completely the same from one moment to the next.

There is no predetermined melody and no song hidden inside the image.

The music exists only in the encounter between the generated sunset, its continuous transformation and the person moving through it.

The same five monthly colours can therefore produce an effectively endless number of sunsets — and every sunset can be played in an effectively endless number of ways.

A fixed dataset becomes an unfixed image.

An unfixed image becomes an instrument.

And the act of looking becomes an act of composing.

Every performance exists only once.

Just like the sunset that inspired it.

The data defines the palette.
The palette defines the instrument.
Your movement composes the music.

MASEUN is a word made from pjesma sunca — Croatian for “song of the sun”.

Its sound deliberately carries a faint echo of museum: a place made to preserve things.

MASEUN does the opposite.

It takes something that was collected and preserved as data, and makes it fleeting again.