Voyager / 2023
Single channel work, 11:46
Synopsis: Voyager as a wish and demand. Voyager as projecting voice and body.
Longer statement:
The video starts with a short clip from Jupiter's Magnetosphere produced by the NASA/JPL Computer Graphics Laboratory in 1983 (no copyright) overlaid with a few audios sent on the Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977 (for data collection on Jupiter and Saturn) that as a collection have been titled as Sounds Of Earth. The collection includes sounds of animals, volcanoes, wind, trains, a baby laughing and crying, and more.
Then, for the majority of the video, there are shots of a boat sailing, body parts, (dry, shiny, hairy, with an open wound) skin, and rotating scenes from the sauna (and sauna bucket). As described by Foucault, the boat is the ideal heterotopia or othered space, and the sauna is also another othered space as it requires a form of “purification” ritual and practice to enter the space. Outer space could be considered a placeless place versus heterotopias that still have place but are othered in their nature. This then offers an interesting paradox of the spaceship, the ship as the most "excellent" heterotopia, in an entirely placeless, othered, nomadic vacuum of outer space. Voice is then projected via the voyager into this paradoxical othered space.
I was thinking about how we relate to our bodies and how we historicize ourselves. How do we use our bodies and voices similarly to the voyager? To be remembered for generations from now, what would we project to them of our lives? What and how is our voyager? Heterotopias can also be spaces of crises, so how are our bodies affected by crises as a form of othering? How do we enter othered spaces, such as the local sauna where you may meet strangers, or even a local politician, or your home sauna with your family, or when you go to the sauna by yourself and you are alone and bare at that moment? How do we send and feel our voyagers in these spaces?
It was also in part about how we remember our bodies as we age, how we remember and archive scars, freckles, and skin textures that may change over our lifetimes. It is also a struggle with social media and the accessibility of photo and video cameras now - how will I remember how I lived and who will know I was here? Is my voyager videos of my fucked up blisters?
There is also a paradox on these vessels of human exploration, for example, the ship as an instrument of genocide or space colonization, so how is this reflection also felt in the way we voyage...