What Would Life on Top of the Clouds Be Like?
This charming film evokes our collective imagination by allowing us to experience what life on top of the infinite horizontal clouds we see when we’re in airplane would be like.
Future Past Perfect is Carsten Nicolai’s version of an imaginary event that many of us have considered while flying in an airplane: life on top of the clouds. What would it feel like to touch them, walk on them? What lies below that spongy white world and what do those tiny little gaps in the clouds reveal? This short film embodies these unanswerable question by presenting us the beautiful view of stratus clouds (those that are extensive and widened in large horizontal layers) in HD.
The four and a half minutes of Future Past Perfect are the result of 12 years of recording the skies on commercial flights. During this period Nicolai also devoted himself to taking three-thousand photographs and created original scores to accompany the images.
Originally educated as a landscape architect, Nicolai’s work has evolved to include science, technology and sound, making its ways to the most prestigious exhibition rooms like those of MoMA and Pace. Using his alias “Alva Noto”, Nicolai is already a legendary character within the sphere of Techno music, as part of the electronic duo, Diamond Version, alongside Byetone.
“One of my biggest inspirations is nature,” says Nicolai. “I am very interested in natural science and models that try to help us understand what we are surrounded by.”
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