1. In his 1994 released documentary Picture of Light, shot on 35 mm in the far north of Canada, Peter Mettler reveals the paradoxes involved in trying to capture the natural wonder of the northern lights on celluloid. Exploring the tension between nature and technology, and between science and myth, Picture of Light reveals how our increasingly connected world threatens to render obsolete our individual and authentic experiences.
Mettler himself provides a diary-like voice-over, augmenting the film’s images with anecdotes and Inuit legends, while simultaneously questioning the act and responsibility of creating filmic representations of natural phenomena.
Over the course of a one-year editing process, the film gradually took shape out of 18 hours of film material collected during two trips to Churchill, Canada. The aurora could only be made visible by shooting three frames per minute and later expanding time via optical printing. Mettler was aware that the images presented to the audience would suggest a reality completely different from the actual experience, and had already begun to question the impulse to collect images during the long and cold nights in Churchill. For this reason, in Picture of Light, he decided for the first time to use voice-over, with which he self-critically tests the powerful potential and authority of the invisible voice.
Like Mettler’s earlier films, Picture of Light deals with the tension between nature and technology, science and mythology. It reflects upon the desire to track down the wonders of the world and capture them on film, questioning the ways in which perceptions moulded by media forms increasingly threaten to replace our individual authentic experiences.
(source: https://www.petermettler.com/picture-of-light)
In room 13 I am displaying two "recent" operations on and with celluloid. One excerpt is taken out of Peter Mettler's documentary Picture of Light (1994) and one excerpt out of Jeanne Liotta's exploration of archive footage on film, done by night observers like her and me: Observando El Cielo (2007) .
In both cases I feel that my practice carries the same paradox: a mediated experience to preserve or show something authentic, creating the illusion of verisimilitude through images and sounds delivered in a sensory-immersive meditative manner.
2. Jeanne Liotta's work, Observando el Cielo, is, as she describes it herself, a 19-minute-long film, resulting from Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16 mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth. This work is neither a metaphor nor a symbol but is feeling towards a fact amid perception, which time flows through. Natural VLF radio recordings of the magnetosphere in action allow the universe to speak for itself.
Jeanne Liotta gathered footage from the Mc Donald and Fuertes observatories in the USA with the help of the Cornell Astronomical Society and the Macdowell Colony.
Jeanne Liotta is a New York City born, American visual artist, predominantly known for her experimental films. Many of her works focus on the intersection of art and science. In Observando el Cielo she examined our relationship with space, using seven year’s worth of night-time recordings of the sky.
(Source: http://www.jeanneliotta.net/filmpages/observando.html)
