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I am delighted to share details of my new print, A Memory of Darkness, to celebrate my event of the same title and my UK Associateship at the Delfina Foundation x Gaia Art Foundation.
This print is an edition of 10 and is printed on Kodak Metallic paper. The visible night sky in this image was taken at Hinewai Reserve in Aotearoa New Zealand whilst I was on a Pale Blue Dot residency at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, Aotearoa New Zealand.
You can find out more here.
A Memory of Darkness, Louise Beer, 2020
I am so pleased to announce the culmination of my experimentation and research as a UK associate artist at Delfina Foundation as part of the thematic programme science_technology_society, in partnership with Gaia Art Foundation.
‘Join artist Louise Beer and participate in a live, collective listening and contemplation of the night sky and our connection to it.
As the sun sets over the enormous volcanic landscape of the remote Hinewai Reserve in Aotearoa New Zealand, the sky begins to reveal an infinite display of stars and planets, appearing like heavy lights against a pitch-black sky.
As a result of light pollution, many of us across the globe have lost our night-time view of the Milky Way, which can have a philosophical impact on the way we see our ecosystems. When we can no longer look outwards and see our galaxy, we lose a sense of the scale of the emptiness, the expanse of the darkness, and by contrast, the sheer magnificence and fragility of our natural world.
The short live broadcast, A Memory of Darkness, comprises a sonic piece created using field recordings of bird song from Louise’s recent experience at Hinewai Reserve, in her native Aotearoa New Zealand. Alone, looking outwards over the Pacific Ocean, as the warm breeze rustled the native trees nearby and the Rurus (Morepork owls) sang out into the night, the artist experienced overwhelming feelings of both wonderment and environmental grief in equal measure.
The artist invites participants from across the world – who will receive instructions by post – to join her at 19:00 GMT on 17 December to collectively listen to this new sound piece and recall our own memory of the darkness, considering its significance. The field recordings in this piece were made during Louise’s recent residency at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora.’
To Book
To participate, please register, providing your postal address, on Eventbrite using the link below. You will then be sent a package by post containing instructions on how to listen to the 20 minute-live broadcast at 19:00GMT on Thursday 17 December 2020.
Due to the limited places available and the cost of postage, we ask you to refrain from signing up unless you are certain you will be able to attend the event.
There are a set number of places available for different postal zones. If you have any questions please email us at guestlist@delfinafoundation.com.
Pale Blue Dot’s film Under the Fading Light has been featured on SVOX.TV, a new online gallery of artists films.
A still from my filming in Hastings, Aotearoa New Zealand
A commission by Lumen Studios, funded by Arts Council England Coronavirus Emergency Grant. The film was edited by John Hooper.
Lumen Studios have commissioned artists from all over the globe to create a time-lapse of the night sky. Artists filmed a time lapse of the night sky safely from their back yard, garden or isolated park. Looking up at the sky is a shared experience, and is an act that connects us to our distant ancestors as they would have seen a similar view. Due to the constellations differing depending on our position in the Northern and Southern hemisphere, we see the night sky from slightly different angles. By combining the views of the stars together in one video, we get a feeling of the Earth spinning through space from a range of vantage points. As a result, the video seems both disorientating and dizzying. During these times of coronavirus, we may feel as though we are not able to explore the landscape as we usually would. Instead, we hope that viewers may be encouraged to explore the universe above their head from their immediate surroundings. There are many things to be seen by looking up, and it helps us to connect to others that may be enjoying the view at the same time.
Commissioned Artists
Aki Poon (Hong Kong)
Aleks Borys (Poland)
Andreas Olesen (Denmark)
Ashwin Ezhumalai (India)
Dorothy Cheung (Hong Kong)
Yukako Tanaka (Japan)
Esther Hanko (The Netherlands)
Elody Libe (Montreal)
Gil Zablodovsky (Tel Aviv)
Jaz Morrison (England)
Jenny Akerlund (Sweden)
Joe Patrick Shellard (Scotland)
Karolin Schwab (Germany)
Louise Beer (New Zealand)
Nenad Nedeljkov (Serbia)
Pauline Woolley (England)
Roman Gaditskiy (Russia)
Thomas Lord (New Zealand)
The online catalogue for the incredible exhibition, ‘The Complete Entanglement of Everything’ at Ōtepoti Dunedin School of Art, Aotearoa New Zealand, is now available online:
Exhibition Essay
Exhibition Catalogue
Exhibition Images
Image by Jodie Gibson.
Pale Blue Dot Collective (Louise Beer + John Hooper) have been included in the upcoming VOID Collective exhibition, The New Black.
We will be showing our film, Under the Fading Light.
“There is a thread that runs through the THE NEW BLACK, which has to do with what in a human life can be turned into a story, and what can’t. What is susceptible to some forms of symbolisation and narrativisation, and what isn’t? And what do people do with what can’t be taken up into a story? And what rules, methods, practices do people adopt to deal with those residues, those remainders?” Darian Leader
The exhibition will be available to view online via the Void Collective website from 27 October. With thanks to Jacob Weeks and Rachel Letchford for including our piece.
I am delighted to have had my work featured on the Artists of Meraki website. You can see the blog post here. Artists of Meraki is a new independent, artist-led contemporary arts publication, based in London and Milan.
Pale Blue Dot Collective are delighted to have been included in the exhibition ‘The Complete Entanglement of Everything’ at Dunedin School of Art, Aotearoa New Zealand, with a wonderful selection of artists.
This is very special for many reasons, but particularly because I lived in Dunedin until 2002.
‘The complete entanglement of everything is a reflection on how this changing environment
feels and is understood by artists, primarily from Ötepoti. Donna Haraway sees this period as the Chthulucene, thinking of underground spiders, and of underlying connections. She uses the term ‘entanglement’ to help us to imagine different futures, where species might have more to do with one another, and where new engagements might offer new moralities.The Anthropocene is irreversible but might be mitigated if we humans change the ways we generate and use energy, the waste we produce, and the ways we share resources. It is a time for a new approach to caring for the non-human world, and a time to draw on the Indigenous thinking that still places kaitiakitaka, care for the world’s resources, at the centre of cultural activity. It is a time for mourning, and a time to pay attention to the non-human entities both living and inorganic that have been ignored as being irrelevant to human flourishing, but on which we depend entirely.’
Read more about the exhibition here.
To celebrate our inclusion in the group show, we have created a print made using the original photographs used to create the film. The print signifies a moment where both the New Zealand and the UK night skies are visible.
The show runs from Monday, September 28, 2020 to Friday, October 2, 2020 and more information can be found here.
The exhibition accompanies the Mapping the Anthropocene in Ōtepoti/Dunedin Symposium.
I am delighted to share that I have been selected for the Delfina Foundation x Gaia Art Foundation UK Associateship - science_technology_society. This 3 month residency will give me the opportunity to extend my research into the impact of light pollution on the biological world, and how it changes our view of our place within the universe. I will be working with two other wonderful artists, Sonya Dyer and Anna Ridler. The residency runs from October - December. You can read see my profile here and read about the programme here. Towards the end of the residency I will be presenting an event at the Delfina Foundation, which I will share closer to the time.
From 17 - 27 September 2020 Pale Blue Dot Collective will be doing a residency at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. I will physically in residence in Christchurch, and John will be collaborating on the outcomes of the residency across the oceans, whilst he is in the UK.
Together we will be looking into the history of the forests of Aotearoa New Zealand and the life that lived there before humanity arrived on these shores. Here are some images from our self direct residency of the South Island last year, taken in the magnificent Peel Forest. During this residency, I will be staying onsite at the Arts Centre, as well as spending two nights at the Hinewai Reserve on Banks Peninsula and visiting the South Island Wildlife Hospital. We will be displaying our work at the Arts Centre in the future.
Art Science Exhibits has selected ‘In Saturating Blackness’ to be part of their Earth Collections.
Precious Cargo, Precious World is the inaugural exhibition of Earth Collections, the Permanent Collection of the Art/NaturSci Movement - the second movement in Art History to be spearheaded by a woman.
The collection represents the leading-edge of art making with dedication to positive action for Earth's recovery. Curating from the collection will limit the carbon footprint of all the exhibits we present on subjects of Ecosystem Regeneration and Climate Change.
Transport on the AVONTUUR limits our carbon to nearly zero, as 2d artworks are printed, framed, and launched from Hamburg - where our voyage begins - to be exhibited onboard in Sicily from 20 October 2020, before making its way around the Mediterranean.
The collection represents the leading-edge of art making with dedication to positive action for Earth's recovery. Curating from the collection will limit the carbon footprint of all the exhibits we present on subjects of Ecosystem Regeneration and Climate Change.
Read more about this exciting project led by MP Warming here.
Image: Timbercoast
Join us for the next super/collider super/science event on Thursday 27 August at 7PM BST.
Tickets £5 / Buy Tickets Here
The event will feature talks and live performances of Lomond Campbell's harmonographic synth, Hainbach's tape loops and test equipment. This event follows on from Sound Machines at Ace Hotel in 2018, with Look Mum No Computer and Graham Dunning.
Lomond Campbell got tired of trying to make it work in the city so took a chance and bought an old, decrepit 1966 school building that nobody wanted, deep in the rural highlands of Scotland. He took five years out to convert it in to a studio called The Lengths where he now works. Living quietly by a loch, he divides his time between making music and building music making contraptions. Amongst his past glories are winning a BAFTA and recording an album with an orchestra which was released by Heavenly Recordings.
Based out of Berlin, Germany, electro-acoustic music composer and performer Hainbach (Opal Tapes, Seil Records) creates shifting audio landscapes THE WIRE called "One hell of a trip". Using esoteric synthesizers, test equipment, magnetic tape and idiophones his music is both abstract yet very much a corporal experience. He has become known for his immersive live performances for and recently through his YouTube channel, where he brings experimental music techniques to a wider audience.
Lumen is very pleased to announce a new online event series, Readings for Uncertain Times. The first three events are in collaboration with Elastic Fiction. These events are generously funded by the Arts Council England.
Readings for Uncertain Times, Session One - James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis
Tuesday 4 August, 6.30pm-8pm (via Zoom). Join reading group via Patreon
Can Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis help navigate a ‘rebalancing’ in the wake of Covid-19?
Join Lumen for a reading group and online gathering using James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis as a stimulus to explore the precarious and deeply entangled nature of life, and consider how or if it might be possible to balance or rebuild the ruptured systems of our planet in the wake of the climate crisis and global pandemic. The session will be chaired by Lumen and led by Elastic Fiction (Becky Lyon), an artist and researcher exploring nature futures. Lumen and Elastic Fiction will select headline and supporting texts to open up discussion on Lovelock’s work, and explore the ‘reading group’ as a method for working through confusion, cynicism and uncertain futures.
About the Gaia hypothesis
James Lovelock began to formulate the Gaia hypothesis while working for NASA in the 1960s, when challenged by NASA scientists to design an experiment for detecting possible life on Mars. Later becoming an Independent scientist and informed by his work alongside microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock developed the hypothesis that life on earth functions as a single organism and that all living matter from carbon-based life forms to the air, the oceans and land surfaces form a complex, self-regulating system that maintains earth’s capacity to accommodate life. He speaks to the world-making capacity of life where the geologic and the atmospheric are in/direct products of living organisms. 1979’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth was his first treatise on the concept and acts as a headline reference for this session.
Lumen’s reading group series
This and forthcoming reading groups offer a welcoming environment for discussion that is open to all and encouraging of multiple understandings of the world around us. The sessions are embedded and engaged in interrogating more-than-human times, exploring how ‘nature’ has been and still is, colonised, controlled, represented, researched, and protected today. In precarious times we privilege words, philosophies, imaginings of our peers and esteemed thinkers alike for wisdom and guidance.
Read more on the event page.
super/collider’s biodiverse/earth commission by Imperial Lates explores the impact of human impact on the forests of Costa Rica. We present Jenna Lawson’s findings as an immersive audio-visual experience, as we journey from biodiverse forests, untouched by human hands, to disturbed plantations of palm and teak, where a haunting silence exists due to the loss of life as natural forest ecosystems are removed.
It is our hope that from this experience, you can better understand the sheer diversity of life in our world, and the startling loss when we destroy these incredible ecosystems for everyday products that we all use, whilst reconnecting with nature and enjoying the health benefits from immersing in the sounds of the natural world. The results from Lawson’s research will be used to understand the threats that exist and guide the protection and restoration of native forests, connect forest fragments and increase populations of the spider monkey.
Watch the 40 minute video here.
Melanie King
Deadline for application August 20 2020
Deadline for completed commission September 20 2020
Location Online
Apply Online Via Curatorspace
A commission by Lumen Studios, funded by Arts Council England Coronavirus Emergency Grant.
Lumen Studios would like to commission twenty artists from all over the globe to create a time-lapse of the night sky. Artists should film a time-lapse of the night sky safely from their back yard, garden or an easily accessible isolated location. These time-lapses will be combined to create one long video. We intend to screen this video at a number of different locations once it is possible to do so.
Looking up at the sky is a shared experience, and is an act that connects us to our distant ancestors as they would have seen a similar view. Due to the constellations differing depending on our position in the Northern and Southern hemisphere, we will see the night sky from slightly different angles. By combining the views of the stars together in one video, we will get a feeling of the Earth spinning through space from a range of vantage points. As a result, the video is likely to seem both disorientating and dizzying. During these times of coronavirus, we may feel as though we are not able to explore the landscape as we usually would. Instead, we hope that viewers may be encouraged to explore the universe above their head from their immediate surroundings. There are many things to be seen by looking up, and it helps us to connect to others that may be enjoying the view at the same time.
Commissioned artists will receive £100 as an artist fee, for their participation in the project.
For continuity and ease of editing, we would like files to be exported as an mp4, within the aspect ratio of 1920x1080 at 30 frames per second.
I am so pleased to have been selected for the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics - Space School 2020.
The Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics together with art practice ARTYPICAL have curated the international Space Art Summer School. This is a laboratory project for creative research of archives and visual culture related to contemporary ideas about space and the history of space exploration.
I visited the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics whilst in Moscow for the Young Art Biennale in 2014 under curator Sasha Burkhanova-Khabadze, which makes this opportunity even more wonderful.
Curators:
Peter Kirn, creative technologist, musician, and journalist (USA/Germany)
Natalia Fuchs, international curator, new media researcher, and art critic (Russia)
We will look at topics such as:
Space in cinematography and visual art
Space in the work of music composers
Sonification and audification of the cosmos and astronomy
Media art in outer space
Media archeology of space
Philosophy of space and Russian cosmism
Iconographies of human spaceflight
The other artists who were selected are:
Chad Eby / UK
Fahmi Mursyid / Indonesia
Markus Schroll / Germany
Mami Mizushina / Japan / UK
Boris Shershenkov / Russia
Cody Sowerby / UK
Liudmila Siewerski / Germany
Nitzan Satt / Israel
Kris Pilcher / USA
Luke Hooper / Netherlands
Kristina Mikhailova / Kazakhstan
Adriana Knouf / USA
Catherine Sarah Young / Australia
Afroditi Psarra / USA
Sasha Rindisbache / USA
Alexey Yepishev / Russia
Daniil Posazhennikov / Russia
Fabiane Morais Borges / Brazil
Hellen Boyko / Russia
I have received a grant to help create a studio in Minster from South East Creative, Cultural and Digital Support Programme. This grant will help with building material costs and rent costs. Within this 86m2 studio, I will be creating a dark space for installation, sound and projection work, and a research area. There will also be a large space for creating sculptures and installations. I will be sharing my studio with my Pale Blue Dot Collective collaborator, John Hooper. Esteemed artist Rachael Champion initiated the creation of this space and will be located in the studio next door. I am over the moon that we are going to be working alongside Rachael whose practice I greatly admire.
I am so grateful to SECCADs for their generous grant which will help me to create a step change in my practice. I will be sharing more images on Instagram over the coming months.
Images: Rachael Champion
Deadline July 31 2020
Exhibition Dates 30 September - 02 October
Location The Earth Sanctuary for Desert Festival, Arrernte Country, Central Australia
Required Description of work (100 words max) / installation instructions / pictures, screenshots, sketches / your location in the world.
The Artist Expedition Society
Desert Festival 2020
Earth Sanctuary
The Artist Expedition Society and Lumen have come together to present On Ancient Earth, an exhibition of artworks paying homage to the relationships we have with what lies beyond the outer edges of our Earth’s atmosphere.
The exhibition will take place outdoors at night in Central Australia on Arrernte country as a part of The Desert Festival. Our unique venue, The Earth Sanctuary, sits on 100 acres of bushland, and specialises in sustainable astronomy tours.
Central Australia has a uniquely clear view of the night sky, which is of international importance in a world whose ever brightening cities and towns are blocking out a view that humanity has had since its conception. For many artists, this part of the world may feel as far away as the stars we look up at. The exhibition comes to a close on the night of the micromoon - a full moon that happens when the Moon is at the furthest point from the Earth in its orbit. On this night, at 6.55pm the moon will rise as the sun sets.
The artworks that make it into the exhibition will be able to see the stars and the moon, and the stars and the moon will be able to see the artworks. There is a very real chance that the exhibition will take place with a limited human audience due to COVID-19; the night sky may be the primary live audience.
The exhibition will be documented and re-exhibited online for a wider audience.
Due to the remote location of our exhibition, proposals that are accepted will rely on the feasibility of logistics. We are primarily requesting artworks that can be shared via DropBox - eg. film files, sound art files. We will source speakers and projectors locally, and will endeavour to source any other equipment needed as requested.
Proposals must address the relationship that you have with the night sky. You can submit old or new artworks, but they must be completed and ready for delivery on 30th August, one month before the exhibition. The installation of each piece will be site specific, and you can request a specific site in your application. Images of potential installation spaces can be found at the bottom of this document (to be attached). Projecting onto surfaces that already exist in the environment is encouraged, however we can source flat projection surfaces where necessary. This exhibition embraces experimentation.
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There is a chance that we will secure funding to run a series of workshops and artist talks for a digital and live audience via conference call. To be considered for this aspect of the exhibition, please express your interest in your application.
We welcome applications from all artists, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
The Judging Panel will consist of representatives from The Artist Expedition Society and Lumen. A decision will be made and all applicants informed of the outcome by 1st August.
Instagram @theartistexpeditionsociety @lumen_london
14 July
7PM BST
Join us for the fifth episode in our new online event series, super/science.
Buy tickets here.
During this event, we will hear from Dr Patricia Sanchez-Baracaldo about Cyanobacteria and the formation of a habitable world.
Oxygen is essential for complex life forms as it is used during aerobic respiration. During the early Earth there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, and the oxygen we enjoy today has accumulated as the result of biological activity. Blue-green algae, otherwise known as Cyanobacteria, were the first organisms that worked out how to perform photosynthesis - it is during this biological process that oxygen is released into the atmosphere. During this session, we will explore when Cyanobacteria evolved, how Cyanobacteria contributed to making our planet habitable, and why it took so long for complex life to appear in our planet.
Patricia Sanchez-Baracaldo is currently a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader in Microbiology at Bristol University. She did her PhD in plant evolutionary biology in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. As a postdoctoral researcher, Patricia worked on the molecular ecology of Cyanobacteria at Bristol University. She then had a career break of about five years to look after her young family and returned to science with a Daphne Jackson and Dorothy Hodgkin Royal Society Fellowships in 2011. In 2016, Patricia was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Her research interests include photosynthesis, biogeochemical cycles, climate change, microbial comparative genomics, evolutionary biology.
This event will be accessed via Zoom. We will send you the meeting link about 15 minutes before the event in order to keep it as secure as possible. Please also check your spam folder.
Images: Dr Patricia Sanchez-Baracaldo
Armelle Tulunda
9 July
7PM BST
super/collider and Turner Contemporary Margate present “Light Reflections” with artist Armelle Tulunda and astronomer Paul Hill.
Get your free tickets here.
Armelle Tulunda will introduce her most recent project. While studying at École Nationale Supérieure d'Art et de Design de Nancy, she wrote her dissertation, Le sublime cosmique, on the significance of astronomical images in our ways to imagine, and connect to outer space. Armelle will discuss how writing this dissertation led her to create a new body of works using scientific imagery as raw material. Within her work, Armelle uses illusory objects, sound recordings from Voyager, environmental issues, natural and artificial light.
Following Armelle’s talk, Paul Hill will explain in detail about solstices and equinoxes, as well as the phases of the Moon and why we see them as we do. Paul will also explain about the sunset, discussing why we see the vibrant colours within the famous sunsets of Margate.
Paul Hill will tune in from his home town in Wiltshire, providing a live stream of the Sun from his telescope. During this event, we will discuss the celestial objects that we can see in the sky.
Armelle Tulunda is an artist who finds inspiration in astronomy, optics, scientific research and philosophy. Her practice includes works on paper, light installations, photography and video. She questions scientific images and the consequences of the evolution of technologies used in astronomical tools. Throughout her work, Armelle investigates our evolving relationship to the unknowable. Previous projects include exhibitions in Nancy (FR, 2020), London (UK, 2019) as well as a residency in Atina (IT, 2018).
Paul Hill is an elected fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, co-presenter and writer of Awesome Astronomy podcast, a Space Ambassador for ESERO and has appeared on BBC News and Radio to discuss a range of astronomy and space issues.