Exponere
A short experimental sci-fi film on presentation and conservation, ecocide and archives, hyper-objects and interconnections, and the vibrations between all.
Synopsis: Exposure is to live in a system. Exposure to vibrations. Exposure to vibrating particles. We expose our atmosphere to increased emissions, and it thins and thickens in all the wrong ways, exposing us in turn. We peel back systems and expose. It connotes something missing, a lack of protection. It alludes to a burning a radiation, a fire. A structure crumbles. A structure returns. Expōnēre is Latin for exposure. Expōnēre is Part 2, from the project Come Kingdom Come, which was Part 1. This is no longer about a future apocalyptic. Exponere is the present…imperative, and passive…in a language from the past. It is about survival. It’s about hanging on, to something, even in limbo.An uncanny voice tells a bit of the story, in pieces chosen from a random generator…creating, repeating, shifting, recreating. Sounds from archives of various times and places do the same, all under events of catastrophic measure…an earthquake, a tsunami, a fire, an extinction, a meltdown, a cancellation, a silencing, a sun storm. The events are woven into the story and into one Event. Complexity and interconnection, like a composition or ecology. Sound weaves into the image in sync. The charactermoves in reaction to the sound, affecting the image. The triptych of images of various stages in direct exposure to light morph with time, then pulses again with cicadas in a binaural beat, everything shifting to extremes…one tone to one side continues upwards endlessly, one tone to our right continues down.Our senses work to make sense of this as the story concludes…..”It wasn’t one event, but a series of events, that sent particles vibrating faster, in strange rapidly changing patterns. Borders and frames, containers and vessels, lines and divisions, vibrated together and blurred.Exposure is inoculation, but the doses were no longer small enough to be safely taken in. So she went underground, with the insects, and the birds that learned how to fly upside down…though there weren’t many of those. There weren’t many of her, not that survival mattered, as what was still around to define her. Some tapes, some text, some partially developed photos, a lot of time. It all jumbled up together, a pile of history in her bunker to shift through and rearrange each time she decided it was a new day. She had to protect the pile, the Keeper of the pile. She couldn’t risk exposure.”
Maile Colbert is an intermedia artist, researcher, and educator with a focus on time-based media. She iscurrently a PhD Research Fellow in Artistic Studies with a concentration on Sound Studies, cinematicsound design, and its relationship with soundscape ecology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa,Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, through the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, and avisiting lecturer at the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto. Her current practice and research project is titled, Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place, and asks what we might gather from sounding thepast. She is a collaborator with the art organization Binaural, a member of CineLab, IFILNOVA’s research lab for cinema and philosophy, and is an editor andauthor at Sonic Field. She has exhibited, screened, andperformed globally.You can view, read, and listen to more of herwork at www.mailecolbert.com
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