steve
roden
beneath the earth beneath the sky (15 rpm), 2007
digital manipulation of nasa footage of the genesis space probe falling towards earth. 30 minutes, silent
screening: the hammer museum, los angeles, part of the series "restless brilliance" with a live improvised soundtrack.
beneath the earth beneath the sky (15rpm) was created to accompany a live improvised sound performance at the ucla hammer museum in los angeles. the film uses processed fragments from a one minute black and white film taken by nasa of the genesis space probe plunging through space towards earth. along with fragmentation and looping, i manipulated the footage with various simple imovie effects such as mirroring and color enhancement.
because the original film was a low resolution quicktime file; working with contrast and color shifts brought out much of the fragmented nature of the low res digital images. large areas of what appeared to be a white sky began to look like bit mapped versions of persian rugs. rather than attempt to smooth out these artifacts, i used the imovie effects to make this digital noise even more present. the resulting psychedelic patterns are the computer seeing more differentiations in the sunlight and the sky field of the original film than i could - as well as the simple computer processing softward not being capable of holding all those variations together.
the film humbly attempts to summon the spirit of early computer generated video experiments of the 70's - and in particuar the spiritual/mandala/psychedelic experiments of james whitney.
the film moves at a frenetic pace, and is in a constant state of motion and activity. the idea is to create a kind of tension between the active quality of the film and the slow, quiet, repetitive soundscape being improvised. neither the film nor the sound is in the service of each other as much as they will collide together for an evening...
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