Mini Super Nova

Created for GradLab December 2019.

Collaborators:

Brynn Hambley,

Anne Bakan

Karen Loewy Movilla

Mini Supernova, is a collaboration piece between Brynn Hambley , Anne Bakan and me. The design style is based on that used in Feral, as well as the live feed and projection. The original idea was conceived by my interest in magnification through live-feed projection. Together we built a mostly-white model of a park, loosely based on Central Park and the skyline along Central Park West, but included the façade of the building which famously remained standing after the nuclear bomb fell on Hiroshima. Inside the model, Brynn and Anne puppeteered several people and animals through the park while I operated the live-feed camera. Once the entire park had been shown, the bomb fell. Brynn and I left the model to become speaking characters while Anne slowly destroyed the model throughout the next section, becoming a symbol for the atomic bomb. Throughout the second section, Brynn and I removed hundreds of strands of yarn that hung from the ceiling, to slowly reveal a human shape cut from craft paper that we had fixed to the back wall (a reference to the shadows of nuclear bomb victims that were etched into their surroundings by the heat of the blast). The spoken text was compiled by Brynn from real speeches and talks by politicians, comedians, scientists and other public figures that related to nuclear warfare or fallout. As they spoke, Brynn and I donned name tags to identify the speaker who had originally spoken each line. Brynn, Anne and I have continued to periodically research and workshop the piece with the intent of eventually turning it into a full length work.