User:Solarcher

The Earth Is Not At Rest

This is an HD video. In total it lasts somewhere between 10 and fifteen minutes, there is no sound and it is shown on a large wallmounted flatscreen monitor. throughout there are italicised subtitles. It opens with a handheld shot of the moon, out of focus, roaming through dark leaves which dominate the frame. over this, in white text reads "I Sun & Moon". there are 5 headings in total; Sun & Moon, Venus & Mars, Jupiter & Saturn, Uranus & Neptune, and Mercury & Pluto. each chapter ends with a header reading dates and astronomical transits. The majority of the shots are slow, dark tracking shots of spaces in a park heavily featuring dark dense foliage. It appears to be around dusk. the figures of 2 caryatids recur sporadically throughout. In the second segment, after a long slow out of focus shot which resolves to be the back of a head with red hair surrounded by a nimbus of brightly lit greenery, a woman with short red hair dressed in jogging clothes stretches in poses similar to those of the statues. the shots of generally depopulated, except for a child on a bike who cycles across in section 4 and a group of men dressed in white, in the middle distance and out of focus. playing boules. The final chapter ends with a handheld shot attempting to follow a swiftly moving flying object among dark leaves and with a shallow depth of field, then cuts to the opening shot of the moon.

HOW

This work was made in collaboration with another artist, Frances Scott, we met through the show which featured a lengthy discursive process involving around 20 artists. Frances and I wrote, shot, and edited together, at the same time on the same machine or document. Mostly shot on a DSLR, occasionally a handycam, edited on final cut and documents shared through dropbox to allow us to make suggestions or review things while not together. The text which makes up the subtitles is scraped together from Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are dead, a tom stoppard play, A midsummer nights dream, shakespeare, and interviews with an astrologer, who also provided the transcripts which bookend each of the segments. We manually went through the texts and extracted lines which suggested a relation to; astrology in general, games, chance and predetermination, the subjects each planetary body governs within standard astrological readings, incursions of the fantastic or magical into the mundane and sometimes just things we liked the flavour of. We then started to structure them into a kind of dialogue between the astrologer and the texts but not wanting to use a clear device like the colour of the text of the font to differentiate between voices we kept this ambiguous and there is little opposition between statements.

Initially we shot throughout the park the exhibition took place in, largely around dusk and focusing on areas other artists in the show were planning to use. We had a portable, jerry-built dolly rig made from plumbing pipe and skateboard wheels which we used to achieve the creeping shots and for the parallax as layers of plantings or sculptures cross each other. Each week we would shoot, edit and 'release' a new instalment, by adding it to the file playing on the flatscreen in the gallery and by uploading it to the website for the exhibition. there it auto-plays at the top of the page. So in the initial week the video lasted 3 minutes 7 seconds and by the end of the month 13 minutes 13 seconds.

Crust

This is an HD video. in this instance it is projected in a gallery space containing sculptural installations by other artists. It opens with a road. at high speed and shaky and through strong dappled light, it is summer in the countryside. there is a slightly syncopated rhythmic pulse and a smear or imperfection on the lens. As the camera approaches a village and slows down a female pitched computer voice begins to speak. the screen cuts to black. the camera moves among pale leafy shapes in the dark. The narration tells a story about a deep sea experimental mission to drill to the core of the earth, lists creatures which live around volcanic vents. In the process of the mission something goes wrong and something escapes from beneath the crust. The percussive drum beat comes and goes throughout. The pale leaves cut to a roaming shot, dominated by red, with a shallow depth of field of some non-specified organic objects. The images flashes and phases through colours in time with the percussion. Around 2 two thirds of the way through the shot cuts to a sea at sunset. the horizon bisects the screen. the sea is moving sluggishly. The narration continues and describes its becoming aware as the mind of the drilling submarine and continues to describe the rising awareness of the world of objects now autonomous and carrying out their functions without the input of humans and cuts to black.

There are four shots in this film. The opening shot of a road is taken from a motorcycle side car, hence its shakeyness and speed. The second shot, of plants in low light was taken at night in a garden under a halogen lamp, the third, of organic forms taken hand-held through a crystal ball was, again, plants but under available incandescent light indoors and the final shot of the sea shot static in slow-motion. Its all on a DSLR. It was not shot to a plan. I film widely and drew from my archive to assemble this piece.

The voice is from a text-to-speech program reading a piece aggregated and re-written which was collated from numerous sources on the internet, including the Plymouth University Marine Geology unit. It war reworked and fictionalised quite heavily.

The drum beat was sequenced in Logic, based on

Grendel.

A video displayed on a 21 inch sony PMV Display Monitor sat on a table. There are Headphones.

Fading in from black the video opens with a shakey low resolution shot moving through dense forest, the colours of the shot lean heavily towards purple and green and it is quite dark. It smears and shakes and is generally indistinct. There is the sound of a stream. A robotic voice starts to speak with a heavy northern european accent and pitched masculine. Much of what it says is mispronounced; Lakes, for example, becomes Larkez.

It begins with the description of journey on foot into the wilderness. The narrator mentions astral projections, the broken spectre, describes being a disorientated, and describes dawn in the forest

The shot cuts to black followed by static shots of water vapour rising off a lake, each lasting around 30 seconds, the banks of which are lined, down to the water, with trees. The light is strong, close to horizontal and brightly illuminates the mist. In one shot, on the opposite side of the lake a figure with a dog appears and walks down to the water. Other than this there is no on-camera life.

The narration continues, it lists water dwelling fairy tale creatures talks about changelings and alternative life processes/forms, then goes on to describe abiogenesis, the process of living matter arising from non-living. It ends with a description of lake outside L.A. which has been made so poisonous that only by restructuring its DNA can anything survive there.

The final two shots show, in centre frame, a wooden hut on the bank. There are no doors or windows, the mist continues to rise around it. The first of these two shots ends with the narration and cuts to a closer shot of the same hut from the same angle, just above centre. the mist flows rapidly, there is only the sound of trickling water, ambient birdsong, the sounds of the waking forest and occasional grunts and throat clearing off camera. This continues for about 40 seconds then fades to black.