Amy Cutler and Barney Kass Present The Earth Show (2022)
Glastonbury Festival, Gas Tower stage, Shangri-La, 5.30-6.30pm, Sun 26th June 2022.
This was a live earth cinema performance which was a bespoke creation for the Gas Tower spatial cinema stage (diagrams at bottom of this page) using Arduino sensors. The original spoken introduction explains some of the processes:
Welcome to the Earth AV Show.
The Earth Show is a live cinema co-composed by the weather, by environmental monitoring of wind and humidity, a heartbeat, and even brain waves.
Rather than remotely witnessing the spectacle of nature documentary as a global fairytale, or passively consuming it from armchairs, this is a live local experience.
To fit Shangri-La’s theme this year of WE THE PEOPLE, we have intervened with the archives of nature cinema to fit the idea that nature documentary is not a spectator sport, but an ensemble production. We have placed sensors picking up the ring of the audience space, as well as on our own bodies, so that everyone is co-composing the show by affecting the conditions.
Early nature cinema was called PHANTASMAGORIA - an assembly of spectres - and we will be summoning its different assemblies: the complex movements of shoals, flocks, swarms, and other congregations.
Any unusual layers of visual activity and sound triggers you might see and hear are an interpretation of the live data of this gathering space and its symbiosis, using sensors such as a wind monitor and an EEG, reflecting the ways in which each living being finds its place in the compositional whole.
Nature documentary is descended from zoos, circuses, travelling theatres, crowd drawing events and live science shows. It is nature played for the crowd, like the modern version of the Roman amphitheatre. But it is also a multiple life form cinema - showing the processes of life as breath, spark, glow, or pupation.
We are inspired by what has been called nature documentary's "pantheistic phospherescence" to find ways it can be set loose from the human narration and from normal modes of passive consumption, and break out of the black box of the cinema or TV screen to be a shared live experience.
We will travel through some of its canons - from adrenalin stunts to existential threats to the earliest technoflowers created by timelapse - to unleash this ensemble remix for the Gas Tower.
