As Above, So Below / As Below, So Above (2019) is a touring audio-visual installation by Amy Cutler, Sapphire Goss, and Melanie King using a pioneering circular film and projection technique, which has so far been installed in three spaces; the 17th century Custom House in the medieval harbour of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, as part of the town-wide inaugural night festival Eleventh Hour; the Crypt Gallery, St. Pancras, as part of the night festival Astronomical Light by the Lumen collective; and Resort Studios, a historic Victorian warehouse in Margate as part of Margate Film Festival (2019 theme: “Against the Tides”). This three hour film is projected in multiple portals and eclipses, drawing on the history of the telescope, the planet, the microscope, and the (dis)harmony of the spheres. It imagines the coast through celestial geometry, and the worlds over your head and under your foot, from the rock pool to the cosmos reflected in it.
The sample footage below shows the street facing installation space in Margate (5 minute sample of walking around and through the space); beneath this is the installation blurb for the MFF19 version, and example installation photos from 2019.
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
AS BELOW, SO ABOVE
An immersive audio-visual installation by Melanie King, Amy Cutler, and Sapphire Goss, which explores the micro and macro scales of Margate.
This multi-faceted installation will inspire you to look up to the sky, while simultaneously directing your attention to the microcosms below your feet. Inspired by the deranged scales of super- funded nature documentary – which easily toggles between micro biotic life-forms and wide overviews of planetary survival – we collapse scales in our audio-visual display of the Margate sky and coastline.
This night exhibition draws together stationary and mobile scales of horizon, from shifting tidal zones and vintage Margate landscapes, to constellations of light on water, and infrared film capturing living surfaces. The synth music describes a score for the looping of cinema in these “living pools”, simultaneously under, over, and at the surface level of Margate. The use of spheres is inspired by the history of nature film as not a “square genre”, to be watched passively in the black box of television or cinema (where our eyes have gone square), but as a circular genre, developed from the round eye of science. Early film and projection devices were related to the microscope, the magnifying glass, the probe, the telescope, and the circular loupe lens and fresnel lens. Meanwhile, astronomy and cinema are linked as a shared “science of light”, with humans sky-gazing for beacons and lanterns since time immemorial. We channelled this idea in creating a film of the nature of Margate entirely in cinematic portals and eclipses – not all necessarily harmonious, and some as fragile as a bubble.
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Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.
- Theodore Roszak
Imagine seeing on more than one timescale. Why is this disturbing? Because you are already living on more than one timescale. Ecological awareness is disorienting precisely because of these multiple scales. (...) There is no one scale to rule them all.
- Tim Morton
We don’t live our lives against the backdrop of an unchanging cosmos, with cold and barren globes fixed in place. Our perspectives are always moving and reflected, and both film, and sky, can be seen as a photo-graph (a drawing of the travel of light, whether on light sensitive film or on the celestial sphere). Since the astronomical discovery that the universe is not fixed, but dynamic, and therefore transient, cosmic space has been used to mark, elegiacally, the reflections between our own passing and the world’s passing.
For this installation our film-making in Margate was inspired by the idea of cosmic spaces, distortions, and scales, from the reflection in a drop of water making up a rockpool constellation, to the time scale of our entire species in long-travelled starlight – the incredibleness of the this-wordly in the other-worldly.
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We must measure ourselves against the Universe.
- Attila Josef
Every time Moon goes around the Earth it also moves away a little, due to its tidal interactions with oceans. Moon, too, like all in a Transient Universe, never truly repeats itself.
The Moon’s presence is a signifier of an enormous absence. A reminder of all the other moons that we shall never see.
- Reza Tavakul
As a result, a viewer in the right position will see many small images of the sun. The glitter may be caused by natural movement of the water, or by the movement of birds or animals in the water. Even the ripple from a thrown rock will create a momentary glitter. The exact pattern seen depends on the viewer’s precise location. When the sun is really low above the horizon, the glitter breaks because of the waves, which could sometimes obstruct the sun and cast a shadow on the glitter. Caution should be exercised while observing the glitter.
- Journal of the Optical Society
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
- T.S. Eliot
BIOS: Artist-filmmaker Sapphire Goss creates experimental, chimerical videoscapes for installations, exhibitions and live events; Dr. Amy Cutler is an artist, cultural geographer, and filmmaker who works with ideas of geography and nonhuman others through live and site specific cinema; Melanie King is an artist and curator with a specific focus on astronomy.
Tweet us your reflections: @melaniekking @sapphiregoss @amycutler1985 ; all images below: Cutler/Goss/King 2019
