Sky

Sky is a multi-channel video installation in which a virtual camera floats across a panorama of endlessly generating digital clouds. Created through the digital manipulation of a single photograph, Sky turns a still image into a seamless flow of cloud fragments. In doing so, it explores possibilities for the proliferation of the digital image, while also seeking space for quietude and contemplation. The slow drift of the clouds is accompanied by a dreamy synthesised soundscape that is designed, like the imagery, to create infinitely variable patterns and loops without progression or climax. As a counterpoint to our ‘culture of distraction’, Sky offers a meditation on the perpetual present; an ever-changing, yet consistent experience of the present moment. Sky extends Stevens’ ongoing creative interests in the contemporary conditions for contemplation and reflection. In a context where the production and proliferation of images increase exponentially on a daily basis, and therapeutic techniques like mindfulness are flourishing as coping strategies, this work seeks to critically respond by slowing down processes of looking. Sky is underpinned by richly saturated computer generated imagery, and highly self-conscious compositional devices, and yet, it deliberately risks slowness to invite calm relaxation. Responding to a visual culture increasingly characterised by speed, immediacy, and dispersion, Sky simultaneously resembles a looping GIF, while also offering a drawn-out temporality unfamiliar to spectacle culture. As an alternative to the constant bombardment of images experienced elsewhere, Sky uses the visual language of self-help, relaxation and therapuetic culture to decelerate modes of spectatorship and allow for the possibilities of stillness and contemplation.