Infrared imagery as obtained by the Landsat satellite of upper Chesapeake Bay. Image Source: NOAA In Space Collection.
Like in the Powers of Ten by Ray and Charles Eames, design have already move out of the edge of the known universe at a rate of 10-to-the-tenth meters per second: the couple eating on the grass, the shore, the lake, the clouds and weather, the blue marble, the satellites orbit, the Earth’s orbit, the Sun, the Sun System, the Milky Way, the neighboring galaxies, and the void. The film get us towards the Earth again, continuing back to the sleeping human’s hand, down to the level of a skin layers.
It’s 2011 and we are now into a powers-of-10 navigation into the molecular landscapes inside Björk’s Hollow: blood vessels, prophase cells, mitotic Spindles, cytoplasm, chromosomes, a major groove protein trip along the DNA chain through the nucleus, the ancestral ghosts, and the void. We have just experienced a genomic wanderlust from her mother’s to her mother’s, and her mother’s DNA, and all the ancestors thousands of years back. Suddenly we find ourselves as the nanoscopic bead of an everlasting necklace that ties all living kingdoms as we know them today. We realize that the ghostly nowness of this tiny bit is vast, and absolutely wondrous.
Like in the architectural poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (Mallarmé, 1897) those bits of information flow back and forth, in and out, sending messages that spread as gravitational waves transcending the physical media. Matter, flesh, space and time. All matter wandering over the Earth, its landscapes, the skies and ultimately the Universe. Eternal matter that exist within and outside its original body from which they got expelled. Exobodies, minerals, asteroids, and exoplanets. Rocks made of stories, material time records, data storages. Traces of the invisible around us. The outside within; the storytellers of past-and-future and the yet-to-come.
Vanessa Lorenzo Toquero
[hybridoa.org]
