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at the hinge of things, 2018, 14th annual smudge/FOP holiday card
A year ago, we started living the outcomes of our previous year’s project, Living Deep Time Calendar Year 000001. Some of you might have been putting your calendars to use throughout the past year. If so, we hope that, as a result, your sensations of time have become more flexible, open, multiple, perhaps even released a bit from the confines of Human Standardized Time.
Over the next few days, as we continue to soar through the cosmos on our spaceship Earth, we will return to a spot (only in relation to the sun) that is relatively close to where we were 365 days ago. At this darker time of year (in the Northern Hemisphere), we tend to think a lot about our relationship to the sun. At winter solstice, we begin our journey towards spring, more light — and new beginnings.
image: courtesy Durl Kruse
One of our highlights of 002017 was having the incredibly good fortune of standing in the path of totality of a total solar eclipse. Months later, we continue to think about this experience. We recall the elusive shadow bands we glimpsed racing across the grass at our feet, seconds before the bright world around us tipped into deep twilight. We recall the diffused filtering of the extreme Southern Illinois heat, humidity and light that occurred over 20 minutes leading up to totality. How strange and silvery our skin looked in those minutes. Instinctual awe kicked in as we got our first direct and bizarre glimpse of the force that fuels all life on Earth.
An empty round vacuum of blackness hung in a dark afternoon sky, resembling nothing familiar. The distance between the earth and the sun in those moments felt gapingly vast.
images: courtesy Durl Kruse
That day, our practiced attempts to document and responsively image the event didn’t turn out as planned. Yet, some of the unexpected outcomes ended up feeling like our best work of 002017. In celebration of our imminent turn into 002018 and the generative hinge upon which we revolve, we offer one outcome, a video short entitled hinge (不思議), shot on color negative Super 8 film.
The temporality of the film (several hours, time-lapsed into 53 seconds) conveys a small, dark marble (our Sun?!) vibrating and shimmering in a unbounded sky/world/cosmos, unto itself.
When this tiny dot shuttled into motion, flaring a black spill of light, simultaneous sensations of wonder and foreboding arose in us — sensations not unlike those that we often feel in response to living within the material conditions of contemporary life in the Anthropocene.
When reversed into color, the footage displays a multitude of wavelengths running concurrently. A spectral array of radiance reveals itself to human perception. The shift leaves us humbled and in awe.
Happy new year to all.
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