SEA/SKY by Boris Acket

SEA/SKY is an audiovisual installation combining moving fabric, dynamic light and spatial sound in one synchronous piece. The work stems from the earlier conceived EINDER series and is the biggest iteration of the experiments by Boris Acket with fabric up to date. The horizontal version was first conceived in collaboration with Metamorphosis Dance (ES, Madrid): Iratxe Ansa & Igor Bacovich and presented afterwards at Mutek MX in Mexico and monopolBerlin.

SEA/SKY is a work that encourages the audience to think deeper about our relationship with nature, and our future experience of natural habitats. The fabric moves as if it is a body of water, or a continuously moving sky; an emulator of natural phenomena. The project started off mid-pandemic with a vertical version called EINDER I in collaboration with Dutch musician Elias Mazian. It marked the beginning of an artistic research project into fabric, motion, light and sound: by linear actuators, vertical motors and both artificial and natural wind.
What originated as a ‘backdrop’ slowly transcended into a poetic piece about the constant friction between control and surrender; the fabric is only controllable to a certain extent. The parameters are controllable yet each synthetically generated wave behaves slightly different than the next. In combination with an audio landscape made out of two opposites: synthetic sources emulating natural sounds such as waves and storms in a dazzling duet with field recordings by acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton: soundscapes that were and never will be again, recordings that are not recordable anymore because of human sound pollution. The past in conversation with a possible future. SEA/SKY progressed into an emulator of natural patterns and phenomena; a vertical or horizontal water surface transforming into different weather conditions and appearance by movement, light and sound.
In a way SEA/SKY is about humankind’s relationship in living together with nature. You can see SEA/SKY as a poetic translation of that relationship. We want to control nature as much as we want to set it free.
With this in mind, SEA/SKY seems to trick people into thinking about humankind’s ways of controlling nature, of looking at nature and our ways of always wanting to control something we actually can never fully understand or grasp.
EINDER is a hypnotic piece, not behaving exactly the same way even once, seemingly alive in every space it occupies. It asks us the question if this experience is something like the future of watching nature, and it tries to open our eyes for what is actually around us at all times: a beautiful earth we should cherish and nurture.