ARP (Absorbing red photons) 2016

• Main Author: Atherton, Michelle
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: North Pole
• Online Access: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/22982/5/Atherton_Absorbing_%28AM1%29.jpg; https://shura.shu.ac.uk/22982/6/Atherton_Absorbing%28AM2%29.jpg; https://shura.shu.ac.uk/22982/4/Atherton_Absorbing%28AM3%29.jpg

ARP (Absorbing red photons) is the second in a trilogy of videos, which began with Dreams of Flying that use the tourist trip as a methodological starting point for the artworks. For a long time we have held the view that certain journeys are seen to be emblematic of their time - the journey to the North Pole, the ascent of Everest, the flight to the moon, and the dive to the Mariana Trench. If these journeys involve an aspect of escape, the escapologist is not only escaping from something but also of course escaping to something. It has been argued by, amongst others, the German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberg 1958 and more recently reiterated by the art historian Marcus Verhagen that tourism evolved out of the French Revolution and advanced in step with industrial capitalism. Verhagan comments ‘that tourism springs form a utopian impulse that is directed along a spatial axis rather than a temporal one, and that as a pattern of consumption, it unavoidable defeats that impulse.’ (Marcus Verhagen Art Tourism Art Monthly 358 Jul-Aug 2012 pg9). The tourist trip combines the desire for freedom at the same time that it undoes the possibility of finding it, and as a result speaks to many of the contradictions of our time. The work uses such tourist trips as a means to gather foundational material and as a springboard for making works that refer back to the complexity of our experiences. ARP (Absorbing red photons) 2016 is a single screen video installation exploring what might be at stake in an act of submersion in a space of perpetual darkness. The video uses footage shot from a descent, 2,000 ft. below sea level, off the coast of Roatan, Honduras and presents the view from the submersible’s thirty-inch porthole. No human presence is ever seen, only the intermittent sound of released oxygen and creaking steel, reinforcing the separation of the confined and claustrophobic space of viewing - the sub, and the fluid space of submersion. As the camera travels through the water it draws the audience ever deeper into the ...