WATCH & LISTEN

W A T C H & L I S T E N

F I L M

THE SOLDIER & THE POET

A collaborative poem by Claire Beynon & Elizabeth Brooke-Carr
Read by Paul Sorrell & Claire Beynon | Music by Chris Zabriskie

HIDDEN DEPTHS | Poetry for Science

Embark on a lyrical under-ice voyage in the company of a science diver, a pteropod, a flotilla of silver and white bamboo boats and an ancient giant of the uni-cellular world - tree foraminiferan, Notodendrodes Antarctikos. Painterly and metaphorical in its approach, this short film addresses a number of scientific and metaphysical themes in a novel and thought-provoking way.

BREAKING NEWS | A Prayer for SYRIA |with music by Darin Sysoev (Russia)

One morning, after reading a New York Times article titled, ‘NEWS HEADLINES: SYRIA – NO VICTIM TOO SMALL’, I paced agitatedly around my house unsure what to do. The prompt came - ‘make something’. So I began working on a short film combining stanzas from a poem I’d originally written in 1994 in response to the genocide in Kosovo and Rwanda (the 20thanniversary of the genocide was this past week) with lines borrowed directly from the New York Times article I’d just read.

The film, titled ‘BREAKING NEWS – A prayer for Syria, was my attempt to build a bridge between two vastly different realities (mine and theirs) so that through the process of identification, the situation is shared, becomes ‘ours’.

I wove in a soundtrack by composer DARIN SYSOEV, a Moscow-based composer only to find that when time came to acknowledge his contribution, his music was not listed under the ‘creative commons license’ as I had thought. Because of the strict copyright laws, I could not post the film online without his permission. The internet facilitated a process that would once upon a time have been nigh impossible. I was able to track him down within a couple of days; I wrote to him via Facebook, explaining my project and the ethos behind the film. Since I was not in a position to offer him any money for his contribution, I invited him to consider the project a collaborative endeavor. After viewing what I had made, he graciously accepted, granting me permission to include his exquisite music. A meaningful exchange ensued and a bridge between worlds was built.

WORDS ON WATER

SRI/USR Conference, Phoenix, Arizona | April 2014

"It is all one water. A finger in a tide pool brings our shores together." Marylinn Kelly

SMALL POINTS OF LIGHT

This presentation is a celebration of planetary complexity and exuberance. Light is the linking motif. A child's painted angels — adrift in a lime-green sky and dressed in up-to-the-minute fashion -- come face-to-face with a swarm of orgiastic fireflies. A woolly bear caterpillar perseveres through fourteen light-less winters before spinning its way into a new cycle. Ancient uni-cellular organisms add luminosity to the White Cliffs of Dover and ballast to the Egyptian pyramids. In an underground laboratory in Upstate New York, microscopic masons embark on a collaborative experiment with artists and scientists, creating new forms out of the bodies of their ancestors. . . A sense of wonder contributes light to a world tinged with peculiarity and uncertainty.

Two research seasons in Antarctica (2005 - 2008) gave rise to a series of curious and compelling Art-Science collaborations with US and Australian scientists. I will speak of my encounters with this other-worldly place -- a fierce and lyrical wilderness of ice and light — and, too, of the mysterious worlds that opened to me beneath the lens of our field station's microscope. Reference will be made to the work of poet Emily Dickinson, 19th Century biologist Ernst Haeckel, protistologist, linguist, violin-maker and esotericist Edward Heron-Allen (1861 - 1943) and, too, the Tibetan master Djwal Khul with his invitation to "establish upon the earth a great station of light which will illumine the whole of human thought".
Claire Beynon, 2012