UNDERWATERSPACEMAN
Dear Reader,
I give to you this gift. It is a gift best experienced in a dark room, alone, with headphones. I want to show you something. Well, I want to show you everything but I don’t think thats possible. I feel like a snake half shed; how do you feel? Let’s feel it together. Let’s find things we didn’t even know were hidden. Unearthing archaic treasure, like we used to.
When you were a child did it come as a shock that there was all this space yet to be explored? All that space pressing above us, and as above so below. Down here it looks like you could touch it. Down here I feel like I could touch it. All that space above. I envision reaching out and grabbing it - but I don’t. I wait. I wait for you. Submerge with me.
Forever and always,
Your underwaterspaceman
UNDERWATERSPACEMAN, was created amidst the first U.K. lockdown, May 2020, as a way of curating a fully immersive experience for audiences to connect with from their homes. In collaboration with Weston Skeates, we set out to create a video-game, which would be accessible to those who wouldn’t usually engage with the format.
UNDERWATERSPACEMAN is an 8-bit style game, which blurs old school video game aesthetics, with cinegraphic footage and design. Set amidst a subaquatic universe that blurs the line between above and below, staggering temporality and memory. You play as a sub-nautical person, traipsing across the sea floor for notes in a bottle, semblances of someone you once knew.
“Listen to this,
The Pacific Ocean is wider than the moon! - How crazy is that? Theres so much down here I want to show you. So much I want you to experience.
I saw an underwater waterfall once, (I know, they exist too). It was surreal in its grandure. Heartbreakingly beautiful, like a song that plays as a star dies. I didn’t quite feel on earth when looking at it. It’s a familiar feeling. I was so small. We are so small , but sometimes my emotions feel larger than our solar system. They radiate such distance I wonder if they give off transmissions.
Anyways, I heard a story I think you might like, I sent it to you on a tape!
Forever and always,
Your Underwaterspaceman”
To access the UNDERWATERSPACEMAN Demo, please email me HERE
Submerged
Collaboration with Stefan Dale
‘Submerged’ is a collaborative film featured within the UNDERWATERSPACEMAN DEMO, curated by myself and Stefan. Stefan Dale provided a composition surrounding the themes of ‘submersion’, to which I wrote a somatic response. I later integrated the subsequent poem into a filmic format. Aiming to create a sense of longing and nostalgia, each element plays off their relation to the other, conversing on their creation.