Jovian Space

A few months ago, my friend Duane and I decided we wanted to collaborate on some kind of video/ music/ words project.  We started exchanging various files via Skype and bouncing ideas off of each other.

A few months before that, we had discovered we shared a fascination with the planet Jupiter (and FYI, in case you don’t know, when you want to say something has the qualities of Jupiter, the word to use is Jovian).  I think it would be fair to say Duane and I have slightly different feelings about Jupiter.  Correct me if I’m wrong here Duane, but I’d say, in a word, Jupiter fills you with awe, whereas it mainly fills me with dread.

When we began exchanging files, the first thing I gravitated toward was a short piece of music Duane had made called “Jovian Space”.  I put it on my mp3 player and decided to go out into the world with it on repeat and film things while listening to it.

I Skyped a bunch of footage to Duane and we decided it might also be interesting if I wrote a poem about Jupiter and read it over the footage and the music.  Writing a poem about Jupiter turned out to be easier than I had anticipated; I just wrote about how it made me feel, how it made me feel sorrow, and lonleliness, and scared.

Duane put it all together in fine fiddle.  The end result looks like one long take of video but it actually one short take and one long take that Duane seamlessly edited together.

This is not the sort of thing that is “for everybody”; it is, undoubtedly, arty.  But it is the sort of thing I really, really dig.  I could watch stuff like this all day.