Pale Blue Dot Collective
The World Inside the Forest

Portfolio

Our selected work below is designed to represent our working methods and our track record in delivering projects with an environmental message.

A Short Journey Investigating the Canal

This film was produced to celebrate the Canal and Waterways Trust move from Paddington Basin to their new offices further along the canal. During the process of creating this film we interviewed team members from the Trust and used soundbites throughout the video. The Canal and Rivers Trust are the third largest landowners in the UK and some of the canals are over 150 years old. This film was part of a wider project to draw attention to the heritage of the canal and how it can play a part in community and provide an escape from the stress and oppression of the city.

Earth Series

This image was taken by Louise Beer on a self-directed residency in New Zealand in June in 2019. In order to tie Louise’s astronomy based practice with her ecological practice, she decided to pursue a series of landscapes that represent the deep time nature of our planet. Since leaving New Zealand in 2002, Louise has thought about these places continuously. They are the places that inspire her to protect all environments on Earth. These images endeavor to offer a window into largely untouched nature that has risen and fallen for millions and millions of years.

biodiverse/earth

biodiverse/earth was commissioned by Imperial Lates through super/collider, it explores human impact on the forests of Costa Rica. We present biologist Jenna Lawson’s findings as an immersive audio-visual experience, journeying from tropical rainforests untouched by human hands to disturbed plantations of palm and teak, where a haunting silence exists due to the loss of life as natural forest ecosystems are removed.

It is our hope that from this experience, you can better understand the sheer diversity of life in our world, and the startling loss when we destroy these incredible ecosystems for everyday products that we all use, while immersing yourself in the sounds of the natural world. The results from Lawson’s research will be used to understand the threats that exist and guide the protection and restoration of native forests, connect forest fragments and increase populations of the spider monkey.

Using sounds collected during Jenna’s research, John has constructed a journey through the forest. We begin at dawn with the natural sounds of the spider monkeys home and from there approach the edge of a plantation. The sounds of the spider monkeys fade away and the patches of land turned over to plantations ring out with the sound of insects. here, John has overlaid the ghostly sounds of animals which would have once roamed these areas before the intervention of humanity. The ghostly sounds are made from Jenna's recordings of spider monkeys, squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys, macaws and toucans. John has layered them and changed the speed and pitch to suggest a disruption of the natural world. From the plantation we return to the natural sounds of Los Planes where the animals return. We repeat the process traveling through another plantation and ending in Piedras Blancas. The disparity between these environments is truly brought home to use via the soundscapes, acting as not only a sonic break but a break in the natural order

Steve Aishman wrote a JavaScript program that makes drawings based on the interactions of various sounds. Whenever a sound reaches a certain level, it makes a ring that then diffractively interacts with other rings from other sounds creating an effect like ripples interacting on a surface. The rings in the drawings are based in a program called “Ripples” by Saiki, S. (2019)

Micro + Macro

Our project investigating the shoreline from the perspective of a sea creature in an attempt to understand how the seas and oceans must be for our aquatic neighbours. If we experienced life as they did we would be bombarded by pollution, not just waste in the form of bottles, wrappers, plastics of all shapes and colours but also rope, containers and a multitude of other things from industry that uses the sea. On top of that we would have to cope with light and sound pollution which is only now being recognised for its destructive influence on our environment.

Taking us down to the size of these creatures will hopefully help in explaining the massive impact we have through various levels of pollution. They all individually may seem small to some but every light we produce every noise we make every bottle top is a ginormous roadblock for our environment.

Floating in Space

This is the second image of a new series from a residency we recently completed at The Margate School.

Our images examine the parallels between floating in the ocean and Earth moving through our solar system. The work is contemplative in nature, as we investigate the giant landscape of the sea-life and plant-life that lives in Walpole Bay, removing our human-centric scale, to the glittering dark skies of Margate. We invite the viewer to imagine how we fit into our ecosystem and how our ecosystem fits into the cosmos. This work explores the fragile nature of our coastal area and shows the connection between all of us, as we stand and gaze over the horizon, or out towards our galaxy.

Exploring Marine Wonders

Working with Kent Wildlife Trust we used these images to illustrate a microscope workshop. They are part of our project looking at the life forms around the South East coast.

Beneath the Moon’s Gaze

The geology of the Lake District has changed monumentally over the past 500 million years. The southern third of the Lake District is made up of rocks such as slate, siltstone and sandstone, which were formed at the bottom of tropical seas ~420 million years ago. The landscape of the Lake District has gone through periods of being dominated by volcanic activity, limestone, sandstones and the Ice Ages.

The abundance of nature in Grizedale Forest led us to think about the formation of life on Earth, which some scientists believe happened within tidal areas 4 billion years ago. At this time, the moon orbited much closer to Earth than it does now which caused huge tides to ebb and flow every few hours.

These tides caused variations in the salinity in coastal areas which may have driven the evolution of early DNA biomolecules. The sounds of the tide, captured on the current British coastline, were recorded in response to my stay in Grizedale. The recording has been slowed down to correspond to the time before Grizedale existed and the area which was to become the Lake District, was under tropical sea.

Bringing the sound of the sea back to Grizedale is an attempt to bring a cosmic perspective to viewing the landscape. Through the ever increasing loss of starlight and dark skies, we are losing our relationship with the universe, and forgetting our place within it. This piece is an attempt to bring focus to the long evolutionary journey of all the local flora and fauna, and the cosmic importance of each strand of life that exists on Earth, in contrast to the darkness of space.

A Memory of Darkness

The Delfina Foundation x Gaia Art Foundation
UK Associateship

Louise Beer

I spent my residency at the Delfina Foundation x Gaia Art Foundation expanding my research into the environmental and philosophical impacts of light pollution, and our disappearing access to natural darkness. I spoke to many scientists, artists and writers about these subjects during this period.

As part of the science_technology_society programme, I created an online listening event called A Memory of Darkness. Audience members were invited to sign up to the event using their address, and were posted a print of my image with instructions on how to access the secret link, and an eye mask to wear during the event. Over 100 people joined from all over the world during the event, and many submitted a response to my submission form about their experience of the night sky after the event.

Event Description
’As the sun sets over the enormous volcanic landscape of the remote Hinewai Reserve in Aotearoa New Zealand, the sky begins to reveal an infinite display of stars and planets, appearing like heavy lights against a pitch-black sky.

As a result of light pollution, many of us across the globe have lost our night-time view of the Milky Way, which can have a philosophical impact on the way we see our ecosystems. When we can no longer look outwards and see our galaxy, we lose a sense of the scale of the emptiness, the expanse of the darkness, and by contrast, the sheer magnificence and fragility of our natural world.

The short live broadcast, A Memory of Darkness, comprises a sonic piece created using field recordings of bird song from Louise’s recent experience at Hinewai Reserve, in her native Aotearoa New Zealand. Alone, looking outwards over the Pacific Ocean, as the warm breeze rustled the native trees nearby and the Rurus (Morepork owls) sang out into the night, the artist experienced overwhelming feelings of both wonderment and environmental grief in equal measure.

The artist invites participants from across the world – who will receive instructions by post – to join her to collectively listen to this new sound piece and recall our own memory of the darkness, considering its significance. The field recordings in this piece were made during Louise’s recent residency at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora.’

Swaledale, Gunnerside Beck

A moment of contemplation. As the river cuts its way through the dale it passes a recently collapsed river bank. Several trees have made their way down to join the river. Upstream the power of the river amplifies.

Lumen Residency Film, 2018

Lumen have been running artist residencies in Italy for over four years in collaboration with Natasha Sabatini, a London based artist, originally from Atina, Italy. In previous years, we have held our residency in the peaceful village of Atina, situated 154km from Rome in the province of Frosinone-Lazio. Frosinone-Lazio and many areas of central and southern Italy, benefit from natural darkness, natural beauty and is a great place to visit for viewing the Moon, stars and meteor showers.

This is the film we made for the 2018 residency.