Harstad Kino, screen 1
Artist presentation with HC Gilje where he will show and talk about previous films and extracts from installations, in addition to presenting The intimacy of strangers which is a commissioned work for this year's festival.
Barents (mare incognitum)¬¬, 5 min, 2015. Commissioned work for Dark Ecology
Vardø Kystopprøret 2, 5:30, 2022. Excerpt from installation.
entangled, 2 min, 2018. Extract from installation.
rift, 6:30 min, 2017. Commissioned work for Vertical Cinema, with sound by Justin Bennett.
The intimacy of strangers, 10 min, 2022. Commissioned work for AMIFF 2022.
Barents (mare incognitum) 5 min, 2015. Commissioned for Dark Ecology
A view of the Barents Sea slowly rotating: up becomes down, east becomes west. The only thing you see is the dark ocean with its waves and the grey sky with its clouds, and the sharp dividing line of the horizon. No sign of land, no boats, no oil rigs, no planes, no seagulls, just the ocean and sky.
Barents (mare incognitum) was filmed close to the border between Norway and Russia, with the camera pointing towards the North Pole. The camera used is my custom-built orbital camera.
Vardø Kystopprøret 2, 5:30, 2022. Excerpt from installation.
An excerpt from one of several works I made and presented in Vardø, commissioned by Nordnorsk Kunstnersenter.
I made a series of works entitled Vardø Kystopprøret, based on 3D scans of some of the fishing equipment used by the coastal fishers. I was fascinated by the very intense colors of especially the fishing lines (which apparently have no practical value as they are used so deep in the ocean that there is no light), and how these very concrete objects turned into abstract point of colours.
entangled, 2 min, 2018. Excerpt from installation.
A cloud of white points swirling around in a black space. Based on a 3d scanning of the artist in a forest.
The work evolved from thoughts around the unclear boundary between me and the other.
The world is already inside us: about half the cells in our body do not contain our own DNA. The air we breathe, the food we eat, including the chemicals, hormones, antibiotics and heavy metals that end up in the food chain, become part of us. Our senses are at the same time a border and filter to the outside world. Technology affects perception in several ways – it extends our body in how we sense and react to the world. As Gregory Bateson, anthropologist, social scientist and cyberneticist, put it: for a blind man and his stick, is the stick part of “me”?
rift, 6:30 min, 2017. Commission for Vertical Cinema, sound by Justin Bennett.
rift is a film about petrochemicals, the completely different durations involved in the process from plankton to oil to plastic, the relation between depth and time through the layers of the Earth, the transformation and the forces involved in turning captured sunlight into food for plants, plants into crude oil, extracting the oil and making plastic which combined with ink (another petrochemical product) is turned into colourful packaging for consumables, and then thrown away, adding to the heap of plastic in the oceans and in the ground, with a much longer duration than the item it served as packaging for, the person who bought it or the company that made it.
This might sound like a gloomy film, but it is also a film celebrating motion, energy and colour, accompanied by Justin Bennetts groovy soundtrack. It is my homage to the New Zealand artist and motion enthusiast Len Lye.
Rift was commissioned by Dark Ecology for the Vertical Cinema program:
35mm cinemascope presented in a vertical format.
rift is made of more than 10.000 microscope images of plastic wrappings for consumables.
The intimacy of strangers 2022. Commission for AMIFF
The intimacy of strangers is a work that explores the microscopic landscapes of the lichen living on one rock in the stone fence around Trondenes Kirke.
Apart from the extreme variations in appearance, textures and color, lichens have become the poster organisms for a new biology which challenges the idea of the individual and supplements the theory of evolution. They also expose the limits of human knowledge, something explored in the writings of Alexander Bogdanov, Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway and Merlin Sheldrake among others.
Lichen eat rock: Through a process called weathering they grow into the rock and inject strong chemicals and mine it for minerals that then becomes part of the eco system (and might end up in your body at some point). When lichen die they become the first nutrient-rich layer of soil on new land (and the oldest dated lichen is 9000 years old).
The most striking thing is that lichen is not one organism, but a symbiosis of several organisms from different kingdoms: Mainly a fungi that partners up with a photosynthesising organism (either algae or bacteria). In the context of evolution, when a branch diverges from another branch on the tree of life this means that a new organism with slighly different traits have evolved from its parent branch. What is going on with the lichen is that branches from completely different parts of the tree converge, or grow together, acquiring a completely new set of traits.
The film was created using a custom made computer-controlled mechanical stage and a digtital microscope combining almost 50 000 microscope still images into miniature landscapes.
During the festival you can go to Trondenes and have a look at the rock in the fence.
Soundtrack by HC Gilje with drums by Justin Bennett.
Read more about The intimacy of strangers at the artist’s blog here.