Deep Above (2016)
Single screen video with sound.
28 mins.
♦Deep Above: low res on Vimeo.
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Deep Above continues Chodzko’s exploration into human behaviour, perception, cognition, and disavowal. Through a hyperbolic sci-fi proposition placing the understanding of contemporary art as the only solution to avert global environmental disaster from climate change, and proposing too, what might have to be done to art in order for this functionality to be catalysed, Deep Above presents itself as science fiction brain programming that becomes itself, and becomes us, as we watch it, in order to heal a “bad relationship.”
We know climate change is happening; we experience extreme weather conditions and observe the wealth of data, imagery and analysis as evidence, and ‘everyone’ seems to be talking about it. Yet, individually, we seem to have paralysed ourselves from taking immediate action to avoid the consequences of climate change. Deep Above uses a distilled, intense combination of moving image and sound to explore, short-circuit and abstract our slippery self-deceptions regarding climate change. Adopting the languages of a tutorial in meditation, hypnosis and ‘self help’ Chodzko evolves an art work developed from a series of approaches to the subject, including the work of psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe, sociologist John Urry, theorist Brian Massumi and George Marshall’s book Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.
Deep Above, suggests that the poetic, reflexive and critical structures of contemporary art itself might be the only form capable of rewiring and subverting our deeply entrenched behaviour of ‘ignoring the elephant in the room’. The reason we can’t see it is that somehow we have ended up inside it.♦
Deep Above was commissioned by Invisible Dust and funded by the Wellcome Trust.
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Related works:
A Hostile Environment (2019)
Adaptation (2013)
Borrowed Cold Lodge (2008)
Desert Island (2013)
Longshore drift, early Detroit techno and other processes of erosion (2006)
Sleepers (2016)
Spare Room (2014)
Synthetic Copse: Our Ash Hospital (2018)
The Quarantine Ship (2013)
Too (2012 – ) [ installation in ‘Being Human’, Wellcome Collection, London, 2019 ]
Rising (2013)
You’ll see; this time it’ll be different (2013)
