Cosmos Night: Flood of Light
September 8th, 2019
Averill Park, NY, United States
On September 8th, 2019, smudge studio invited our artists in residence for an interactive micro-production. The micro-production, entitled Cosmos Night Flood of Light included a moon-viewing experience and serving of tea. The event, staged to coincide with the September waxing moon, was held outside the Studios, next to the creek.
The micro-production staged an aesthetic encounter with the blazing sunlight that filled the so-called "dark" night sky. smudge studios Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse orchestrated words, silence, tea, empirical observation and imaginative sensing. Their aim was to invite the felt reality of the interdependent, co-arising of vast cosmological forces that intimately shape life on Earth.
Cosmos Night: Flood of Light is part of a larger, ongoing project Koans for the Anthropocene, through which smudge studio aims to offer local, ephemeral, unrepeatable acts of aesthetic hospitality. Through Koans, they invite audiences to pay close attention to the ever-shifting and impermanent conditions of life on Earth by enframing seemingly commonplace activities of everyday life (the drinking of tea, the awareness of sunlight) within perspectives on time, landscape, and interactivity that are geologic in scale. By offering embodied experiences of the Anthropocene nested within the cosmological, they aim to deepen collective abilities to re-scale human expectations of stability and predictability, without sinking into distraction or despair, and to creatively inhabit Earth’s ever-changing conditions.
Cosmos Night: Flood of Light aims to be an occasion where, together with participants, smudge studio will empirically experience the 360 degrees of wild, blinding light stretching before us for billions of light-years, and unhinge a few of the names we’ve used to point at (and miss) the wildly unpredictable forces that are neither nameable objects nor binary opposites: night, day, light, dark, sun, moon. The hope is to do this in an undistracted state, using the “technologies” of our bodies, the out of doors, the night sky, and aesthetic experience. The hope is to gain (re-discover?) an embodied experience of reweaving our selves into the cosmos.
