You first saw the light
You First Saw The Light On Such And Such A Day And Now You Are On Your Back In The Dark (Samual Beckett - Company)
You First Saw the Light is a study of a fragment of comet measuring 50 microns (0.05mm) across. It was collected from the stratosphere by a NASA high altitude research aircraft in 1985, and goes by the official name of LAC3B_grain10. The origin of this tiny piece of material is probably in interstellar dust clouds that pre-date the formation of our Sun. Much later in its life, a mere 4 or 5 billion years ago, it would have accreted into a comet and commenced its huge eccentric orbits of the star. It witnessed the formation of our Solar System, becoming a part of it. At some point, as the comet underwent its characteristic loss of material, this fragment would have become detached and eventually trapped by the Earth's gravity. Its current stage of its life cycle sees it stored in a glass vial in a clean room in a planetary science research facility. Although this might seem like the end of a journey, the possibilities of further transformations and displacements within a universal timescale are huge.
Its current destination and resting place is also questionable. The particle is here on Earth, although denied full contact in order to maintain its scientific importance. It must remain in a certain state of detachment, isolated from the complex webs of material that make Earth what it is and that define comets, asteroids and cosmic dust as something 'other'. It is here, but it is not here.
The artwork is presented as a four-channel video installation in which the form of the object appears and disappears, breathing and ghostlike. Hundreds of individual images at micron level focal increments have been merged in time-lapses which traverse the form of the object as it hovers against the velvety blackness of space. Meanwhile, a 5mm replica of the fragment carved from meteorite rotates under a video microscope, resembling the evocative images of solar system bodies photographed from space probes.
This fragment of ancient material can tell us much about the formation of the Solar System. It can tell us much about how organic chemistry is ubiquitous in space, and therefore give us clues about the origins of life on Earth. It can tell us much about how our own presence here is the blink of an eye, that we know so little, and that looking up towards the dark is a deep compulsion within us all.
The work consists of two parts:
The first part is 4 channels of synchronised video made from hundreds of microscope images of the particle focussed at intervals of 1 or 2 microns.
The second part is an approximate replica at roughly 100 times the size of the particle. The replica has been hand carved from a piece of NWA8131, a 39.8g carbonaceous chondrite meteorite discovered in North West Africa in 2013.
You First Saw the Light was made in collaboration with Queenie Chan at the School of Planetary Sciences at the Open University. It was commissioned by Threshold Studios as part of the Digitalis 2017 program.
