A meditation on shifting ideas of being home: where it begins and ends. Of being right and wrong: how we lie about the difference.
The Word of Several Million Years began as a sound experiment utilizing musical phrases taken from the song "The Word of the Lord" from Leonard Bernstein's Mass (1971). I took lyrics that were interesting and contradictory, such as "Nothing can stop the Word of the Lord" and "For several million years". I imagined two versions of Earth in that time-frame using Mars as a counterpoint to the edenic and desolate versions of our planet through its history. These incompatible homes flux, shift, and breathe in the space between and gulf of time.
I left behind the didactic words for an abstracted soundscape created from a song I wrote for Nastroism. "May You Ascend" is a hymn that contemplates the goal of all of humynity: to ascend into the realm above and live among the stars. I replaced the singing with a dream I had, about being in space over the Earth (but it wasn't Earth) and trying to remember how to get down. This meditation has come from years of quiet thoughts and building interest in the outer world relationship to the inner.
The Word of Several Million Years
2018
Video, satellite imagery, synthesizer
Variable, 1920 x 1080 px