2017 | United States | Documentary

Singularity Song

  • English 5 mins
  • Director | Rachel Mason
  • Writer | Rachel Mason
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Singularity Song" is a meditation on black holes, pairing legendary butoh dancer, Oguri, with the voices one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Kip Thorne and black hole physicist Rana Adhikari. Oguri performs the human embodiment of imagined life within a black hole as a narrator describes the events which occured billions of years ago which led to the breakthrough first detection of gravitational waves, in 2015. This detection earned the team of Kip Thorne, Barry Barish and Rai Weiss the Nobel Prize in 2017.

Oguri's body floats and undulates through textures of metallic fabric as voices describe the mystery at the center of the black hole. The center has been called "a point of infinite density" or the "singularity" and as Thorne's voice expresses in the piece, if we can understand the singularity, we can understand the origins of the universe.  A song composed and sung by Rachel Mason  weaves in and out of vocalizations by indie rock icon Carla Bozulich and experimental composer Anna Homler. These sounds were recorded by Rachel Mason at a noise show at Zebulon in Los Angeles, California.

Kip Thorne is revered for his groundbreaking work on black holes, gravitational waves and speculations about the possibilities of time travel through wormholes. His work was the foundation for Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.  Rana Adhikari one of the chief architects of LIGO and an expert on black holes. Mason  conducted  interviews with Thorne and Adhikari at their Caltech offices. Singularity Song is the first part of a larger project called "The Moving Mountain," a fiscally sponsored program of Fulcrum Arts, whose goal is to create new works of live performance and film based upon the poetic imagery that emerges from conversations with physicists.

A Moving Mountain Production

The Moving Mountain is a project of Fulcrum Art's EMERGE Fiscal Sponsorship Program

 

Physics Black Hole Singularity Universe Butoh
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