THERE’S ONLY SKY (2024)

THERE'S ONLY SKY (2024)

This split-screen video essay emerged from my RIXC residency in Riga, where learning Unreal Engine intersected with exploring Soviet radio astronomy architecture. The work weaves transcripts from an Unreal Engine workshop at Arebyte Gallery with footage captured at the Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Center in Irbene, Latvia.

New security protocols at the operating facility—possibly military, responding to the developing situation in Russia—transformed the project unexpectedly. My planned week of filming at the site, reached via wintery forest dirt roads deliberately without signal, was compressed into a few hours of recording in the rain, my polka dot umbrella held over the camera by one of the station's stoic lighthouse keepers. The giant red star at the gates was shut, and the work shifted direction entirely, becoming about frustration, impossibilities and strange ceiling lamps as much as cosmic reception.

Rain hitting the decommissioned radio dish forms the soundtrack—each droplet a physical proxy for gathering signals from space. Central to the piece is an accelerating digital fern that splits and fragments across the screen. Ferns, originating 400 million years ago, here bridge ancient organic processes and contemporary digital manipulation.

The work investigates how learning complex technologies mirrors our attempts to decode natural phenomena. Layers of reality and unreality intertwine through liquid interpretations of radio reception, with simulated physics questioning our mediated relationship with both cosmic and earthbound environments—finding poetry in the impossibility of fully grasping either.

https://air.rixc.org/solveig-settemsdal-norway-2024/ https://echogonewrong.com/photo-reportage-from-the-exhibition-ok-swallow-great-by-solveig-settemsdal-at-the-rixc-gallery/