REVENANTS: OPTOGRAPHIC ANIMATION

Digital video from 8mm/16mm/35mm projected onto circular screen, sound, 09'04''

2023

​Made from a mixture of cameraless animations, scratch film and 8mm/16mm shot footage, this installation creates a world from light, time and chemicals. It hovers in space, oscillating in scale from molecules and matter to the celestial. An eye, a droplet, a cosmos. It is shot around the coast in Kent and developed using sustainable methods. Landscapes slowly emerge from chemical chance,, images slowly emerging from grain and matter. The edges of the film reels make horizons, holes are suns or moons, static/grain bleeds into light on water into stars, chemical forms into clouds . This work explores and shapes the terrain of the celluloid. The sound is made from a mixture of field recordings and samples from 16mm educational films - warping and distorting with the optical strip on the celluloid, Rain blends into static blends into waves - material and form merging in and out with each other. and becoming indistinguishable.

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“Mr Palomar thinks of the world without him: that endless world before his birth, and that far more obscure world after his death; he tries to imagine the world before eyes, any eyes; and a world that tomorrow, through catastrophe or slow corrosion, will be left blind. What happens (happened, will happen) in that world? Promptly an arrow of light sets out from the sun, is reflected in the calm sea, sparkles in the tremolo of the water; and then matter becomes receptive to light, is differentiated into living tissues, and all of a sudden an eye, a multitude of eyes, burgeons, or reburgeons…”

"Sword of the Sun" / from Mr Palomar (1983), Italo Calvino.

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Exhibited as part of Analogue Uncanny, solo show at UCA Brewery Tap & new version commissioned for SALT & EARTH Festival Folkestone, UK (2023)