The conceptual translation of the research station material to the video installation is described below.
Stillness compressed
Activity refracted
You enter a dark space. The only source of light is a big cubic shape, suspended from the ceiling. You can walk around it, but it hangs high enough for you to walk under, allowing you to enter into the middle. The shape consists of four big 16:9 screens, arranged in a cube. You are the observer of a poetic distillate of time, a simplistic model of reality. In the installation the 12 month of recording are condensed into 12 hours and time as a fluctuating phenomenon is made comprehensible.
The spatial experience is carried forward by an audible symphony, the sound is pending between the extremes of atmospheric soundscapes, drones of nature and rhythmic or melodic narratives. As you walk through the space, you experience how you physically leave or enter sound-spaces, thus you can situate your own perception by audibly reinforcing or contradicting the visual images projected on the cubic object.
The extreme duration of the installation invites you to surrender to the experience, to spend hours passing through the seasons or to return again over several days.
Imagine the parallel dimensions of time, your own urban pace, the dreamy rushing of the arctic seasons and the people living there. Reflecting on your perception – as if watching the function of your watching.
By creating parallel models of times; the fluctuating landscape, the nonlinear views of daily life, and the time of the audience experience, we suggest connections that transcend locality, expanding the space of the now.
Outside installation
Having entered the exhibition space you meet the recorded images of the local performers on the outside of the cube, each screen consistently showing clips from the same person. All four sides will refer to each other through orchestrated changes of colour and movement direction.
How are the actions of each performer affected by the velocity of time? Houses constructed, marriages celebrated, minerals discovered. Long winter evenings in front of the PlayStation, the television flickering as whale skin is shared. Hunting season on one screen, as another shows a glimpse of a council meeting. Everyday and celebration intertwined as the yearly cycle dissolves in short glimpses of situations, moments and faces. Waiting for the ice to freeze, the first day with sun, the last day of the hunt.
Repeated cycles of actions join the cycle of seasons within the cycle of human life.
Inside installation
As you enter into the cube you are surrounded by the landscape recorded from the station. The passing seasons are projected on the walls and the film is constantly increasing or decreasing its velocity, according to the movement in the image. Staying 12 hours, you experience the significance of 12 month according to the research station.
Clouds roll by and transform quickly. Days and nights take ultra-rapid turns in the short spring and autumn, whereas winter and summer seems to be one endless day or night. Ice breaks, a snow storm slashes, soft spring breezes. Sometimes the “fast forward” slows down radically, when a performer approaches you from a distance, his face close to yours gazing into the spacious ocean behind you, before he passes through all four screens and the times of the year.
Repeated actions of the humans join the cycle of seasons within the cycle of days.
