Metamorphoses
Project soundtrack preview
The ephemerality of form, the transience of energy and the interstices of time beyond human comprehension.
By manually conducting thousands of collisions with magnets, and capturing the reflected light, an experience of the true scale of space-time is created. Tens and hundreds of thousands of split-second attempts, distilled into a handful of images depicting significant outcomes in the evolutionary timeline.
Even eons become fleeting moments.
How do millions of centuries weigh against our moment in time, our understanding of the past and acknowledgement of the future? How do they remain in our collective consciousness as a species? Does even the perception of evolution itself also transform?
This is a reflection of the human observation of the universe, the entirety of our science, culture, history, all microcosms contrasting against the unfathomable metamorphoses of time.
Life, in all its forms throughout millennia, are but mere spectres.
What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over
Following a faint stain on the air to the river's edge
I enter water. Who am I to split
The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed
Of the river above me upside down very clear
What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find
this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret
interior and make it my own? Do these weeds
know me and name me to each other have they
seen me before do I fit in their world? I seem
separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped
out of nothing casually I've no threads
fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
I seem to have been given the freedom
of this place what am I then? And picking
bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
no pleasure and it's no use so why do I do it
me and doing that have coincided very queerly
But what shall I be called am I the first
have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go
to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees
till I get tired that's touching one wall of me
for the moment if I sit still how everything
stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre
but there's all this what is it roots
roots roots roots and here's the water
again very queer but I'll go on looking
"Wodwo" - Ted Hughes (1930-1998)