MIDNIGHT & TO BODY

Who determines the protocol for looking at the sky? Like moss and fungi, animals and plants, and indeed most living beings, the sky does not have borders. It moves and is part of a larger system that includes the moon, the sun, and the stars. MIDNIGHT is a companion project of SKYWORLD/CLOUDWORLD, a more extensive series by Amelia Winger-Bearskin. MIDNIGHT continues to explore themes of a communication network throughout the skies using video, musical compositions, and physical installations. The artist was inspired to make this work when she heard a politician lay claim to the “universal ethical protocol” for looking at the sky. This led Amelia to contemplate various notions of owning the sky: the laws that treat airspace as territory or an extension of the land, the regulations governing what kinds of frequencies we can emit across the open air, the geographic information systems whose satellites we can see if the night is clear enough.

MIDNIGHT & TO BODY XL is currently on view at the NXT Museum in Amsterdam, and their installation at the Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS) airport. MIDNIGHT and TO BODY: For Two Screens, Was recently installed at LMCC, in NYC, as part of the Anti-Venom Video Curation.

This series of work includes large-scale multichannel video installations at museums, live opera performances with video, a short film, digital artworks, and large-format prints.

Note on the Artificial Intelligence the video uses:

Amelia’s short film uses Image Inpainting, a technique from the field of AI that is historically used to reconstruct missing regions in an image e.g. object removal and image restoration. Amelia uses this technique subversively by inpainting to erase the prominent human architecture of the videos she took, reminding us that backward-looking prediction erases a possible future. The short film also uses digital image interpolation when an image is resized or distorted from the one-pixel grid to another this gives the film a liquid morphing process, which Amelia finds hypnotic and out of time.

The algorithms assist the animations; the images are photographs (not AI-generated) taken by the director while driving across the country, moving from the west coast to the east coast of the USA).

I WOULD LIKE TO BE MIDNIGHT / I WOULD LIKE TO BE SKY (short film)

A Selection of film festivals that is has appeared in:

Official Selection, imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival 2023
Best Experimental Film, Montreal Women Film Festival 2023
Best Artificial Intelligence Film, Cannes World Film Festival 2023
Best Artist Film (short), Brussels Capital Film Festival 2023
Best Artist Film (short), Green and Environment, Berlin Indie Film Festival 2023
Official Selection (Experimental), Māoriland, Ōtaki, New Zealand, 2024

A selection of museums where the film is installed:

Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, USA 2023
Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at Yale: Research Gallery, New Haven, Ct USA 2023