|
Heliocentric is co-commissioned
by AV Festival
+ Northern Lights
Film Festival, UK. The single screen version will
premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010 in competition.
The multi-screen installation will premiere during AV Festival 2010,
at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, UK.
|
|
Heliocentric uses time-lapse photography and astronomical
tracking to plot the sun's trajectory across a series of landscapes.
The entire environment feels to pan past the camera whilst the sun
stays in the centre of each frame, enabling us to gauge the earth's
rotation and orbit around the sun. As the Suns light becomes disrupted
by passing weather conditions and the environment through which
we encounter it, it audibly plays them as if it were a stylus.
It is usually all but impossible to visualize how the earth moves
around the sun, even though we know it to be true. Instead we 'see'
the sun move around us. The 'heliocentric' view of the universe
was debated from the third century BC onwards and remained contentious
into modern times.
Shooting into the sun creates many intriguing artifacts; lens flares
and glare spill over the landscape, white outs burn the image, and
colours bleed into one, creating aureoles. The power of the sun
still exceeds what both the human eye and the artificial eye of
the camera can bear. And whilst our knowledge of the universe is
ever-growing, we can only encounter and know it from our own humble
vantage point.
|