Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2024: A Cosmic Movie Camera

Curated by Nora N. Khan & Andrea Bellini.

Artists: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Alfatih, American Artist, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Sheila Chukwulozie, Formafantasma, Aziz Hazara, Interspecifics, Lawrence Lek, Shuang Li, Diego Marcon, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Sahej Rahal, Jenna Sutela, and Emmanuel Van der Auwera.

Scenography: Giacomo Castagnola
Virtual exhibition: Presented by EPOCH

Astrophysicists, analyzing the first-ever images of a black hole derived from the Event Horizon Telescope, recently realized that they needed to focus more closely on the light just beyond: a photon ring that seemed to course around the black hole. Likened to “a cosmic movie camera,” the ring, some scientists propose, could “contain a succession of images of the entire universe.”[1] We were stunned by the idea of a ring of all possible images – and by the accompanying scientific animation of a ring of light populating a phantom film screen millions of kilometers wide. According to this concept, if one were to ever observe the ring of light, one would “see every object in the universe, infinitely many times.”[2]

More than just an evocative image or a fanciful metaphor, the “cosmic movie camera” is an instructive model on an unfathomable scale. The photon ring is visualized by parsing computer simulations of concentric rings of light. In models, each photon ring creates a “film frame” of the universe, embedding time lapses of the seen world. Our ability to capture this bend of light over time makes it possible to sense the unseen void (the unobservable black hole), allowing it to sit indirectly within a realm of augmented perception. 

A Cosmic Movie Camera is, first, a celebration of the many variations of the moving image that have found a home in the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement. Classic video works glimmer alongside hologram avatars speaking in the voices of long-dead movie stars. Images made by machines for machines to see alternate with painstaking hand-painted animations. A Cosmic Movie Camera is, second, a showcase of just one ring of possible images by which we know the unknown. Light bends to create all possible images: constructed, projected, generated, soft, and synthetic.

The 15 artists gathered here have long been interested in the edges of the known, the quantifiable, and the limits of our ruthlessly spectacular visual regimes. As poets, they have leaned toward what is not seen, the indiscernible, and that which resists capture. Each suggests how the moving image allows us to approach the unseen. The moving image, here, is produced by computational and theoretical models, and simulations of real-world phenomena. It is more automated, self-directed, and operational. It shapes political movements before its authorship or veracity are checked – if at all. As neural networks learn, hungrily consuming images, they in turn generate countless unseen images that take on a life of their own.

[1] Thomas Lewton, “A Black Hole’s Orbiting Ring of Light Could Encrypt Its Inner Secrets,” Quanta Magazine, September 8, 2022, https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-holes-ring-of-light-could-encrypt-its-inner-secrets-20220908/.

[2] Ibid.