Borrowing from a term used to describe the temples of ancient Egypt which were designed to be open to the heavens, the piece is named Hypæthral, from the Greek for “under” and “ether.”
In reading Kay Larson's Where the Heart Beats, an epic book about John Cage and the inner life of artists, I came across an excerpt of a 1952 article by art critic Harold Rosenberg. In it he observed that for American painters the canvas began to appear as “an arena in which to act — rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” I was intrigued by this idea of art as process rather than an end product intended for another's half-hearted consumption. In the end, what is paramount is our relationship to our work as a means of ‘self-alteration,’ as John Cage said.
The ether is filled with slumbering music, echoes of our modern age. In the spirit of John Cage's Imaginary Landscape No. 4, I was interested in hearing the invisible and allowing the unseen to permeate my being and my work. Each shot of this film is accompanied by a stereo recording of the audible ambience of the location in which it was filmed as well as a recording of the inaudible ambience which I captured using a $20 AM/FM radio.
To allow even more space for the world to breathe life into the work while leaving less room for my ego to fill it, I employed chance operations to determine certain aspects of the work — random numbers generated from atmospheric noise determined the duration of each shot in this 40-scene film, and the score was evolved from thirty-two single notes on the major pentatonic scale.