#they want to sort themselves into elemental teams and dream about going to the spooky magic castle

[antidisneyinc]

what were ur opinions on hp before j*r exposed herself as a transphobe? Genuinely curious

people are right ofc that it's a deeply troubling universe from the perspective of adults, but kids don't give a shit about equal rights lmao. they liked it for the messy danger, not in spite of it. almost everyone in the world who grew up with it loved that franchise prior to 2016 or so and anyone pretending otherwise is a posturing liar

[boldtendencies]

Artist Talk - Emilija Škarnulytė

Emilija Škarnulytė is from Lithuania and completed her BA degree in Sculpture in Italy. There she found an interest in working with landscapes and the politics and economics surrounding them, specifically in areas where global warming is visible.

Škarnulytė was discovered by Bold Tendencies through her installation called No Place Rising at Calvert 22 - a Russian and European gallery in Shoreditch - which explores the idea that the future is certain but the past is unpredictable as it can be manipulated over time. Škarnulytė observes landscapes through the perspective of a future archeologist arriving back on Earth after human extinction, seeing the scars of buildings that tried to expand human knowledge. Škarnulytė captured this idea by creating a strange tale juxtaposing panned shots of Norway’s submarine base and her physical embodiment of a mermaid.

Škarnulytė chose to base her piece in Norway because she considers it an eco-friendly and idyllic country. But, although Norway’s landscape is only perforated and not yet affected by global warming, maps of what mines and oil rigs will look like in 2030 leave room for uncertainty to build over the future of the northern landscape. The mythological creature next to a highly technologically advanced facility allows people to see what Norway could look like after humans have become extinct and have left behind what they built. The building will become like the Pyramids in that it will show society’s goals and what drove it to build it. Through this piece, the visitors are left to immerse themselves within this story and to speculate what the future will look like.

At the moment, Škarnulytė is working on her first feature length film based at the nuclear power plant in Lithuania, a twin sister of Chernobyl. Using her own cameras and drones,

Škarnulytė is immersing herself into the site, willing to risk hypothermia or jail time to discover, capture and record the moments and knowledge left behind at this nuclear power plant. With a nuclear storage base buried in Sweden in the Baltic Sea and 80 nuclear plants buried in the sea in France, the fate of Earth in 80 years time would be a graveyard.

Humans are building a graveyard. Her work represents the mytholythic structures from the past, extinction, and geotraumas. Architecture has become the main character in her creation.

Mirror Matter comes back to this image of discovering scientific sites in the future, 10 000 years from now. Like cathedrals or pyramids for us, they would raise the question of what the people of this time were doing here, the reasons why they built such installations… Mirror Matter is made in different parts: a soundtrack and a video projection.

When creating it, Emilija first thought about the visuals and then about the sound; she imagined them to be together in the end to create a full physical experience, to add a more emotional element to the scientific data. For the last three years, she was inspired by laser scanning and was interested to experience it herself. She was reflecting about science progress and how our perception of ourselves is changing since the first researches on space and Earth. Science is constantly evolving and made by myths that are always changing. Our knowledge is a process, we always change our perception and how we place ourselves in this world. She found access to these technologies by approaching scientists in the field and collaborating with them.

The bubbles in the first part of the video is footage from the Neutrino Observatory in Japan, which was built in the 80s in Canada. Unfortunately, the artist has never been able to fulfil her dream of visiting the observatory before it closed down. In order to realize the video, she used architectural maps, drawings and blueprints to recreate space in 3D. She worked with a programmer whose father used to work in the observatory, which made it easier for them to collaborate since he had the occasion to visit the observatory himself a lot when he was younger. They tried to recreate the feeling of being a an specific room : a chamber where scientists would try to capture the most elusive particle in the world. - neutrino which can pass through everything.

Since neutrinos are travelling through us all the time, in a way we are colliders; we don’t need to build a machine because it is happening inside of us. We don’t know what 95% of the universe is, only what we call ‘dark matter’ or ‘dark energy’. Neutrinos are then an answer to all that unanswered mass. So are we;  we are just 5% material. The chamber was made because neutrinos cannot be captured to be studied; instead, the chamber contains 30,000 mirrors reflecting the neutrinos through light, and this how they can be observed. Each mirror is a detector, as beautiful and fragile than a sculpture in itself. The observatory is actually closed because the team working there discovered what they needed in the 80s.

The soundtrack is from a machine made with x-rays of black holes. The data from the x-rays is converted in numerical code and is sonified by composer and a scientist from the European Space Agency who is investigating the highest energy point in our universe which is the edge of a black hole. The satellite used is an x-ray machine put in space, observing the black holes from far away. In the end, the sound we can hear in the dome is not really the actually sound from a black hole, but the best version that we can recreate, on the edge between live stream and archive - a renewable archive, since there is a 8 hour difference between the actual black hole and the dome. She considers herself to be a mediator between the scientists, who use dry data, and the people. She wants to give physicality and emotion, to mold and shape : data then becomes malleable, like clay.

The other part from the footage is a laser scan of CERN in Geneva: it is the Lager Hadron Collider, the biggest machine humans have ever built. It is made of a 21km (16mi) long ring, underground, where strong magnets make particles accelerate at almost the speed of light. Then, the scientists can take an image of the collision of the particles, and through this collision can observe the a phenomenon comparable to the Big Bang. (This part is, according to Emilija, very simplified). She considers it an archaeological ruin already, because the team has reached the point where they cannot answer their questions thanks to the collider - just like the observatory in Canada. She is waiting to see how this soon to be abandoned place is going to grow, by the symbiosis of new pieces and geology, flooded with stalactites, or even animals. For the images she scanned the collider with a liler, used in archeology and mining industry. It is a laser which captures the space. She still used a 2D 16mm camera, but she wants to expand the way we capture the images with different technologies. This type of laser technology was used in Guatemala, were the laser was used for a helicopter; more than 150 Mayan temples and several hidden cities were found. Underwater laser scanners are always used by scientists to observe and study the sea in different parts of the world. Through Mirror Matter, she wanted to create the same type of experience : what we see inside the bubble images is not computer created, but scanned.

The reactions to the sound of Mirror Matter are often between relation and anxiety. Emilija talked with the composer about balancing these two, so that it does not come out as too spooky or violent but still create the experience of feeling the black hole physically. The place of the installation is also important : by being on the rooftop, Mirror Matter is a sort of meditative space, like a monastery. It is here to hide and feel elevated from the city noises.

Art trainees Elise Devaux and Hanne Peeraer.