“The Moon Is a Mirror” by Scott Hessels

Title:

The Moon Is a Mirror

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2015

Medium:

Video and sculpture installation

Duration:

Continuous loop

Size:

75 cm x 75 cm each

Artist Statement:

This artwork contemplates the screen and its origins. The moving image’s preference for the clear screen ignores its historical roots in translucent organic materials. Naturally-occurring translucent materials (dove feathers, fur, reptile skin, seeds, and seashells) were selected for their unique qualities to diffuse light. Embedded in organic resins, the materials’ variations in texture, color, and density affect the video playing on the commercial-grade LED grids behind them in custom-made raw steel frames.

The relationship between the video image and the screen are key to the piece–nature acts as an organic lens and filter for a digital image. The light sculpture explores both mediated organics and translucency’s ability to create both a material and discursive surface, looking at and looking through. Using a simple walk cycle, a foundation of animation, the sculpture shows a man pacing, trapped between a mediated environment and a constructed nature.

The work was developed concurrently with the Sustainable Cinema series of five public sculptures and provided another perspective to cinema’s relationship with nature. The five machines created the moving image with natural force; this work intends to consider the origins of moving image screen. In each, cinema’s beginnings are reimagined by designing an alternate fictional history that maintained the original natural power systems and early organic surfaces. The works both dream of a world where the moving image was not appropriated by the industrial and digital ages. Media archaeology and new media art are placed in a new, co-dependent relationship with an active natural environment once again.