The Great Refractor: The Kropotkin Game – stereo preview

ADVANCE PREVIEW – NOT FOR PUBLIC VIEWING

The Great Refractor: The Kropotkin Game
2022; DCP video; 5.1 sound; 12 min. 20 sec.
(preview cut; stereo mix) 

The Great Refractor, a collaboration with Irish poet and neuroscientist Laurence O’Dwyer, charts the undulating terrain of our attempts to understand the world through both scientific and poetic inquiries. The film contrasts histories of mapping, visualizing and territorializing with contemporary practices centered on sounding, listening and collective resonation. The film proposes a challenge to what the Enlightenment truly may be said to have enlightened, and what voices went silent in the force of that glare. Through a chorus of voices, stories and practices, the project prods at the sensitive and uncertain interface between outer and inner worlds, exploring regions of doubt where an often inscrutable reality meets the echo chambers of human knowledge. Along the way, the work seeks out possible transformations and decolonizations of our processes of interpreting and sharing the world.

The Kropotkin Game is accompanied by two other films, Pavlov’s Ear and Fals Faune, in The Great Refractor project. The films may be presented individually or in conjunction, in screenings or installation settings.

The Great Refractor presents a series of solitary figures engaged in their work: each person, whether an astrophysicist, an artist, a translator or a weather station engineer, is engrossed in their unique process of observation and exploration. Participants were asked to mimic with their voices the sounds of their own sonified observations, from underwater hydrophone recordings to black hole gravitation waves. All the sound in the video was made from these vocal recordings. As the work progresses, the participants vocalizations reach beyond language to become a collective music of utterances, noises and breath. Participants include astronomer Kirill Maslenniko at the Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia; fiber artist Chenta Laury in the palm forest of the W.S. Merwin Conservancy in Hawai’i; Eden Girma, an astrophysicist and jazz vocalist; and Nicole L’Huillier, an experimental musical instrument inventor, working in the Atacama desert in Chile.

credits:
picture and sound by Andy Graydon
original texts by Laurence O’Dwyer
narrated by Dónal Gallagher and Eden Girma

featuring
Nicole L’Huillier
Juan Necochea
Kirill Maslennikova
Oxana Yakimenko
Chenta Talei Laury
Vincent Goudreau
Erica Walker
Florian Dombois
Stefan Helmreich
Isabel Beavers

The Kropotkin Game and Country A / Country B are extracts from the poem, Angelet, Leptidea sinapis (Linnaeus, 1758), by Laurence O’Dwyer, first published in Subtropics 28/29, edited by Ange Mlinko and David Leavitt

Made possible with support from
Film Study Center, Harvard University
CEC Artslink, Russia
McKnight Fellowship in Media Arts
Ireland Chair of Poetry

Thanks to
Russian State Arctic and Antarctic Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
W.S. Merwin Conservancy, Pe‘ahi, Hawai’i
Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Observatory, Chajnantor Plateau, Chile
Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, Haleakalā, Hawai’i
Pavlov Institute of Physiology, Leningrad Oblast, Russia
Central Astronomical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences at Pulkovo, St. Petersburg, Russia
Marine Hydrometeorological Observatory, St. Petersburg, Russia
Haystack Observatory, Westford, Massachusetts

Special thanks to
Susan Katz and Lizaveta Matveeva, CEC Artslink
Sonnet Coggins and Sara Tekula, The Merwin Conservancy
Matt Salenger
Pete Bjordahl
Sahra Motalebi
Beau Sievers
Avi Loeb
Fern Silva
Kelly Nipper
Helene Romakin
Sharmen Graydon
Henriette Huldisch
Luna Necochea
All the participants and their families

© 2022 Andy Graydon