UNCANNY SKY I-III, 2023
Video, 4K, MOV
Dimensions: Variable
Duration: 01:15, loop

The sky is vast, our everyday canvas of colors, and its continuous chaotic shaping has inspired artists for centuries. The light coming from the sun towards Earth contains all the shades of the spectrum, but the molecules in the atmosphere scatter the light's color depending on the sun's direction - blue has the shortest wavelength, so the sky appears blue when the sun shines directly overhead at noon. In the evening, the sun shines from a long distance at an angle, and the blue color fades away. Long wavelengths, red, yellow, and purple, remain. If light rays didn't encounter particles on their way to Earth, the sky would appear black.

In the atmosphere, the light from the sun encounters not only molecules but also various other particles. Since the Industrial Revolution, the impact of human activity on the atmosphere has steadily increased. Uncanny Sky I-III observes new, strange, and slow color variations in the sky caused by particles, using the metaphor of environmental ghosts. The concept of environmental ghosts is based on the interdisciplinary collection 'Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet' (edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt, 2017), which explores the possibilities of livelihood in damaged ecosystems. The 'ghosts' creating new hues in the sky include moisture from storm low-pressure systems, particles released from the combustion of fossil fuels, sand from sandstorms, smoke from forest fires, ash from volcanic eruptions, and even pollen.

Clouds represented a side of nature that the mainstream of physics had passed by, a side that was at once fuzzy and detailed, structured and unpredictable (…) For as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere (…) As the revolution in chaos runs its course, the best physicists find themselves returning without embarrassment to phenomena on a human scale. They study not just galaxies but clouds. (James Gleick, Chaos: Making a new science, Abacus, London, 1988, pp. 3–8).