Deorbit is a work by
Makino Takashi & Telecosystems, commissioned by Sonic Acts for Vertical Cinema (2013).
The myth of Icarus whose waxed feather wings melted away because he flew too close to the sun is an early record of an object falling back to Earth. A more recent atmospheric entry is that of the modular Russian space station Mir on 23 March 2001. The debris scattered over an area of more than 1500 kilometres in the Pacific Ocean.
Deorbit is an observation mission with a mind of its own. It too is a rebellious entity – with a mission to reconstruct knowledge retrieved from space-objects orbiting planets in faraway systems. If we imagine Icarus, let us picture him with a camera, his lens scanning the universe, the most immeasurable depths of space, its outer edges visible only as pixels and black RGB values. The information he sends back comes in tiny packages, bits of data. These compressed images are sucked into the black hole of film, devoured by the universe of grain, and burned onto the celluloid surface. The scanned and observed universe is restructured into a new cosmos in the machine.
Our cosmos is made of the collisions between the two extremes – immeasurably macro and micro.
Deorbit is a journey that starts at one end, in the vast darkness of the outer rim of space, and passes over the Earth’s oceans, mountain ranges, and deserts, and ends at the other, smashing into the atoms of the celluloid grain itself. It is a transfer from analogue to digital and back again, from massive to subatomic and beyond.
12 October 2013
Kontraste 2013
Krems, Austria
www.kontraste.sonicacts.com
24 January 2014
International Film Festival Rotterdam
Rotterdam, the Netherlands
www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com
20, 21, 22 & 23 February 2014
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
www.stedelijk.nl
7 & 8 November 2014
Leeds International Film Festival
Leeds, England
www.leedsfilm.com