Twelve Thousand Years in Fragments
A live film and sound experiment commissioned for Electric Dreams Festival of Immersive Storytelling to run over 8 live performances between 24th July - 16th August 2020.
“Twelve Thousand Years in Fragments” re-imagines 12,000 years of human influence on earth as a 40 minute visual symphony created live by the artist and the audience.
Throughout the anthropocene, humankind has collected, measured and recorded aspects of our lives and our planet - much of this information now floats freely online in archives and repositories, and on our computers and phones.
Filmmaker Katharine Round wades into the internet’s discarded imagery to create a live, spontaneous montage of our digital detritus: an imperfect, fragmented picture, deconstructing the idea of “data” as an objective record and showing how it obscures, hides and presents mythical conceptions of our history and lives
The piece is set to a data sonification by composer Jamie Perera, the melody of our planets evolution from twelve thousand years to the present day.
The interplay between sound, image, data and memory, evokes a past reverberating in the present. In this symphony from the digital wastelands, do we experience humanity’s memory, dream or nightmare?
A subversive, surreal, kaleidoscopic fever dream.
Twelve Thousand Years in Fragments is part of the wider “Climate Symphony” series of collaborative works.
Film devised, directed and performed by Katharine Round. Sound composed and performed by Jamie Perera. Additional montage by Juan Soto, sonification programming by Adrian Lewis and located sound by Jez-Riley French and Phoebe Riley-Law.
Electric Dreams Festival is curated by Mark Atkin and Tom Millen, and supported by Arts Council England.
Currently featured on Labocine’s Scientific Musicals programme 2 Jan 2023 - Feb 2023 https://www.labocine.com/issues/scientific-musicals