67P. Singing Comet
Music/video/art collaboration. 2016
Inspired by the ESA Rosetta mission to the comet 67P Ekaterina Smirnova (artist and project director, New York), Lee Mottram (clarinetist, Wales), Takuto Fukuda (composer, Japan) and Brian Hekker (video editor, New York) collaborated to create a unique atmospheric piece. The music composition is both abstract and representational. At the end of the arrangement they present you the sound of the ocean tide, suggesting the importance of water to us, as living creatures, which possibly arrived on our planet via comets. Ekaterina invited Lee Mottram to her art studio to play clarinet at the same time that she was painting the 67P series. They contemporaneously created independent works, feeding off of each other's expression of sound and color. In the sound studio, Takuto Fukuda created an Electro-Acoustic composition, electronically manipulating the performance by the clarinetist and fusing it with other sounds such as the artist’s heartbeat and water. With their music piece, they tell the story of comets visiting our Solar System, repeating their cycle, curving around the Sun and releasing water to form their tails. The video piece, edited by Brian Hekker and synchronized to the music, invites you to enter the world of creative thinking, spontaneity, repetitions and reverses.
This piece was presented at:
"From Giotto to Rosetta" 50th ESLAB Symposium, ESA, The Netherlands, 2016
ESTEC: European Space Research and Technology, The Netherlands, 2016
NASA, JPL, USA, 2016