A short animation making visual the process of searching, and ultimately determining the final route for 'Twelve Earths' - a planetary sculpture connecting 12 invocatory sites along the earth's circumference. Initiated by Michael Jones McKean in 2017, the project will be completed in 2027.
The animation represents loosely a year long effort to process-through hundreds of thousands of possible rings as they fall on the planet, searching for patterns ti arrive at it final form - a circle around the earth holding twelve locations...
About 'Twelve Earths':
"There is at the limit of comprehension something we call ‘world.’ For humans, the idea of world coincides functionally with Earth: our beginning and limit, a maximum unit. Earth’s energies - its forces, capacities, temporalities, and intensities create the frame of possibility for our existence, our perceptions and myths. Yet even as we attempt to grasp and unlock its complexity, earth remains wanton, escaping us through mysterious registries and vast scale.
This materially real and immanent complexity is the point of departure for 'Twelve Earths', a planetary sculpture scaled to the earth itself. Designed to unfurl as a series of extended collaborations over years to come, its form exists as a 25,000- mile “great circle” stretching completely around the planet to connect 12 invocatory sites of sculpture and event - mineral deposits and nuclear fallout, continents and continental drift, cities and primeval forests, technology and geology. The result is a multivalent portrait of the earth reporting to us in our time, and an extended beacon to unknown futures.
By building a dense meshwork of contact points with people, places, processes, objects, and events 'Twelve Earths' establishes the possibility for both brief and long- form encounters where time/space distances can swirl, collapse, and dissolve. Birth, death, decay, transmutation, mineralogy, emergence, alchemy, architecture, geology, flora, fauna: as a system and technology, 'Twelve Earths' renders these energies momentarily visible, strange, and coherent, expanding and deepening our planetary imaginary."
