Soft Moon (2010)

Jane Grant Kin (2010)

Soft Moon is a computer-generated film Jane Grant made with Kin Design in 2010 which explores the reciprocal attraction of two planetary spheres: the Earth and its Moon. The work is drawn from George Darwin’s Fission Theory, from Henri Bergson’s significant work Matter and Memory and writer Italo Calvino’s short story also titled “The Soft Moon”. Bergson writes: “All division of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined outlines is an artificial division”. The ideas in these works are intriguing; in the film there are shown two seemingly independent bodies in space. In effect their autonomy is ambiguous, as the surface of each sphere mutates in a mutual exchange of matter, emphasising that mass is a density of matter rather than a sovereign state. The film Soft Moon depicts the intensities of exchanges between things, makes visible the unseen: the tiny particles of lost matter, the undigitized dust not entered into astrophysical models. The surfaces of these worlds, ruptured by their encroaching proximity, become strange and uncanny, deformed by the intensities of the exchanges caused by the attraction of the two celestial bodies. In the series of accompanying drawings and in the film itself, tendrils of fluid matter and dust are depicted rupturing the boundaries of the surface of each world, splitting apart the internal gravitational structure.