I Would Like to be Midnight

Synopsis

Who determines the protocol for looking at the sky? Like moss and fungi, animals and plants, and indeed most living beings, the sky does not have borders. It moves and is part of a larger system that includes the moon, the sun, and the stars. This video work is part of SKYWORLD/CLOUDWORLD, a larger series by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, and continues to explore themes of a communication network throughout the skies. The artist was inspired to make this piece when she heard a politician lay claim to the “universal ethical protocol” for looking at the sky. This led Amelia to contemplate various notions of owning the sky: the laws that treat airspace as territory or an extension of the land, the regulations governing what kinds of frequencies we can emit across the open air, the geographic information systems whose satellites we can see if the night is clear enough. Ultimately it is Amelia's ancestors, that she hopes to connect to through these tools old and new.

Amelia is a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.

Note on the Artificial Intelligence the film uses:

Amelia’s short film uses Image Inpainting, a technique from the field of AI that is historically used to reconstruct missing regions in an image e.g. object removal and image restoration. Amelia uses this technique subversively by inpainting to erase the prominent human architecture of the videos she took, reminding us that backward-looking prediction erases a possible future. The short film also uses digital image interpolation when an image is resized or distorted from the one-pixel grid to another this gives the film a liquid morphing process, which Amelia finds hypnotic and out of time.

The algorithms assist the animations; the images are photographs (not AI-generated) taken by the director while driving across the country, moving from the west coast to the east coast of the USA).