Constellating – Cosmic Landscapes (2020)
Constellating – Cosmic Landscapes (2020)
Available at: http://climacom.mudancasclimaticas.net.br/constelar-claudio-filho/
Artwork website: https://claumelof.wixsite.com/constelar
This work, CONSTELAR – Cosmic Landscapes, is the result of an artistic approach to cosmic relations as a metaphor, developed in occasion of the "Art, Science, and Technology" course offered by Professors Susana Dias and Paulo Teles at Labjor (University of Campinas). As part of the activities, we investigated our relationship with the cosmos and the stars and asked what we can learn from them.
The approach I seek is one that was once described by Bruno Latour with the term "being affected." To be affected by the world is to create a dynamic knowledge that is not centered on humanity's uniqueness, but instead has great potential to radiate other ways of being. Thinking about the biological, historical, artistic, or scientific aspects of our contemporary world—where technology has an increasingly dominant role in daily life—permeates much of the fictional imagination built by what I call a "ghostly impression" of how technology will transform and guide the future. This impression provokes displacements in our fleeting relationships with both space and time.
The artwork
With the cosmic relations, we listen to the possibility of constellating. I understand "constellating" as a way to create an energy field formed by a collective body of knowledge that emerges from a group.
Through 22 landscapes exploring the behavior of light, captured by my coursemattes, a stellar path was created. On this path, each point—each star—is connected by a constellation of words. The words that connect them are companion-words, chosen to foster collaboration and co-creation.
The cosmic-landscape are accompanied by a sound experiment that unites them along the path, but the possibility for individual listening is also open: each star has a characteristic sound that the interactor can activate. By following the path of this cosmic landscape, we trace a "constellating poetry" with infinite possibilities for meaning and potential existence.