suppose a beam of light (2021)

Overview

suppose a beam of light is an audiovisual correspondence between kellen r jackson and jeffrey ellom. Woven into the shared letter are wonderings about deep time, queer kinmaking, the portal-nature of microscopes, quantum optics, tunnelling, entanglement, and the experience of oscillating between weave and grain. This piece treats kente cloth as text, its threads fiber-optic cables, transmitting messages whose legibility and substance can change with scale. Time is also scaled within the audio composition, with the prominent theme being a two-note dyad which teeters more and more slowly as the tempo steadily decreases. The tension within this dyad rhymes with the tension between warp and weft, as well as that of the multiple meanings which are relayed through the spacetime of ancestry. Shot on Super8, hand-processed in Caffenol. Text remixed from Introduction To Modern Optics (Fowles, 1975).