Give Them Distance

“Give Them Distance” explores how we comprehend the cosmos and our place within it. Created from hundreds of slides discarded by a university Earth and Planetary Science department, the looped video animates a journey from Earth, through the solar system and space, returning to our planet via fallen meteorites. Juxtaposed with the cycling slide images, droning and degraded audio captured from Walt Disney’s 1979 super-8 sci-fi film “The Black Hole” provides a hypnotic rhythm. “Give them Distance” considers the idea that we have come to know the collectively-imagined cosmos through photomedia and sci-fi films. In this piece, outmoded visual and audio representations of earth and space reveal a cultural and material patina. The video, through its coupling of an unavoidable wearing down with cosmic expanse, attempts to point to the paradoxical coexistence of entropy and the infinite.

Rebecca Najdowski