AS BELOW SO ABOVE
Installation at Resort Studios, part of Margate Film Festival 2019.

Multi-channel projected installation (scaled for each venue), 2019.

Digital video, infinite loop.

An immersive audio-visual installation by Melanie King, Amy Cutler, and Sapphire Goss, which explores the micro and macro scales of nature.

This multi-faceted installation will inspire you to look up to the sky, while simultaneously directing your attention to the microcosms below your feet. Inspired by the deranged scales of super- funded nature documentary – which easily toggles between micro biotic life-forms and wide overviews of planetary survival – we collapse scales in our audio-visual display of the sky and sea.

This work draws together stationary and mobile scales of horizon, from shifting tidal zones and vintage landscapes, to constellations of light on water, and infrared film capturing living surfaces. The synth music describes a score for the looping of cinema in these “living pools”, simultaneously under, over, and at the surface level. The use of spheres is inspired by the history of nature film as not a “square genre”, to be watched passively in the black box of television or cinema (where our eyes have gone square), but as a circular genre, developed from the round eye of science. Early film and projection devices were related to the microscope, the magnifying glass, the probe, the telescope, and the circular loupe lens and fresnel lens. Meanwhile, astronomy and cinema are linked as a shared “science of light”, with humans sky-gazing for beacons and lanterns since time immemorial. We channelled this idea in creating a film of the nature of Margate entirely in cinematic portals and eclipses – not all necessarily harmonious, and some as fragile as a bubble.

Melanie King

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