experiment using super 8mm film.
juxtaposition of the earth's surface below and the sky above to show a common perspective.
titled: surface and above
artist statement:
Wednesday March 15 2006
(for critique at cranbrook academy of art)
I started researching the Copernican revolution over our month of silence. While reading a few books about Copernicus, i had a vision of a piece. I had ordered some super 8mm film first semester and bought a new (for me) Cannon 8mm film camera at a local junk shop. I have always enjoyed the process of shooting film and thought while I was studying at Cranbrook i would explore the medium a bit more.
While reading the books I began to realize that we all share a common ground. We all at some point, some more than others, look towards the sun with wonder and amazement. We also share the common experience of sharing the ground we all walk on. This piece is my attempt in illustrating a common experience that we all share. We are trapped on the ground, some above and some below, but not too far from the actual surface. We look up into the sky and are met with the familiar and somehow permanent sun.
While researching copernicus and the planetary theories that came before him I became aware that these two elements have been the basis for our understanding of our home since the beginning of time. Only for the last 300 years, though, we have known exactly where we are, what exactly we live on and realized our place in the universe, or so we believe.
In the sound I wanted to illustrate the two elements separately. The ground, a place of many unanswered questions, chaos, motion, textures, ideas, vision and wonder, I chose to use elements that mirrored those ideas. The sun, with its day by day consistency and repetitive nature, I chose to use a calming and somewhat melodic guitar loop with layers of static and tone to try to capture the essence, idea and forced perspective of the most consistent element in our understanding of our situation.
At this point, I see this as a finished piece. I also am working on a separate poster that tracks the actual discoveries of our position and shows what other events in history happened at the same time. I hope, when the two projects meet, they can inform each other and shed some light on the current state of understanding of our existence and the events that have led us to where we currently stand.
(poster shown in the "cranbrook 2d" section of the website called "time and place")