Emilija Škarnulytė: Through film and photography, I want to map our future from the bottom of the ocean, as an archaeologist with a mythic perspective of a distant time ahead. Sunk into the sea and beyond into underworlds, from queer undergrounds to post-Soviet ruins, I have dived into the notion of deep time. I have mostly researched places where contemporary political issues are staged between human and non-human worlds, considering the shifting boundaries between ecological and cosmic forces. I want to feel out all kinds of non-human and post-human scales in the depths of space and time: the dreams and fantasies, the scars and damage, the imagined futures.

My last film, t1⁄2, continues the topic of post-human mythology and of fictional, visual meditation about contemporary science from an archeological perspective of the future. “t1⁄2” is the symbol for the term “half-life,” commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo, or how long stable atoms survive, radioactive decay.

I look at the relation between the time duration in which we live and longer periods of time, trying to see different, not-human perspectives: for instance, those of minerals, atoms, or neutrinos. What is hiding behind the veil of invisible infrastructure? What is happening every day under our feet, beneath the Earth's crust? I try to relate to subatomic, dark, imperceptible, otherwise-inscrutable worlds.

ES: While everyone else is pointing towards the future, in most of my films—Burial, Eternal Return, Mirror Matter, and Deep Point Cloud—the time is set 10,000 years from now, but looking from this future into the past, which is actually a present. An archeology from the time yet to come, gazing through the ruins we’re creating, peering into the haunted depths of inaccessible places.

History repeats itself. Rewriting history into a scenario where another species can be at home on this planet is of crucial importance. I am interested in offering evidence on how altered states of consciousness arise. I turn to learning from new formations of underwater plants, which have dimensions that have shaped our history and evolution.

I am working on a new project titled Eternal Return that takes us on a journey through a place where we all can belong. Eternal Return is not based on verbal narration or on conventional documentary tactics. Instead, it articulates the content through light effects, sound, absence, and movements by using an evocative approach to cinema that I have carefully crafted. And I intend to engage the audience directly with these new technologies. Eternal Return will be a meditation on the ruins and possibilities of humanity as seen across the infinite expanse of time. It will map a cycle of eternal return from life to death to rebirth. Female force, pleasure, and the ecstatic offer us a view of a rare path into the beyond. All life came from the water, and I want to trace the path of our return and eventual disappearance beneath the rising waters.

ES: I’m about to start the MAK Schindler Scholarship Artists-in-Residence Program working on a film in collaboration with Caltech Environmental Science and Engineering (ESE) scientists. Combining research material, landscape shots, computer simulation, and archival footage, I plan to reflect on the changing image of the ocean basin and to reconstruct the mythologies and beliefs of the present from the future. Through an immersive, cinematic environment, coupled with talks and performances, I want to explore what magic and mischief humans are up to under the surface and to unearth the tools used to accomplish it. Along with research trips with scientists and conversations with engineers, I want to explore the possibilities and limitations of emerging technologies used to study and map oceans, to extract from the deep-sea, and to scan with sensory-remote LIDAR, elaborated Landsat landscape data, and polarimetry.

ES: The work Sirenomelia is set in far-northern territories where cold, Arctic waters meet rocky escarpments on which radio telescopes record fast-traveling quasar waves. Sirenomelia links man, nature, and machine and posits post-human mythologies. It is shot in an abandoned, Cold-War submarine base in Olavsvern, Norway, and is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest mythic creatures—the mermaid. Performing as a siren, I swam through the decrepit NATO facility while cosmic signals and white noise traverse the entirety of space, reaching its farthest corners, beyond human impact.

I wanted to counter this militarized place, which still retains the myth of war, with a counter-myth—and sea creatures have always been mediators of "nature."

The ocean is sound. It is transmission. The ocean is cosmic. How does one measure the ocean and its scale? I used my own body to measure the depths of time and space. The ocean is like flatland, which is another dimension, maybe the 4th or 5th or 6th. The ocean is like space, unknown and invisible. To reach it, we need to cross through it. It’s the state where time and space coalescing is almost tangible. I am trying to explore the thin line above and below water, dividing the real and the quantum.

Hunting for a lost and decaying deep time, observing human-generated scars in the strata has become somewhat an obsession of mine. This is especially true after visiting Spitzbergen and seeing the ice melting around me. I am interested in earliest life—the single-celled organism. A sizeable quantity of water would have been in the material that formed the Earth. Water molecules would have escaped Earth's gravity more easily during its formation when it was less massive. The water level is rising; we will go back to the water from where we came.

A liquid is a nearly incompressible fluid that conforms to the shape of its container. How do we perceive the invisible—with remote sensing? All underwater footage in Sirenomelia is shot in the actual navy base and footage from other films was generated by this material. A continuum merges together and they add to one another. In the series of my films, I try to have a vision from a future perspective, observing man-made places that become monuments: submarine bases, particle accelerators, neutrino observatories, mining sites.

ES: The work Mirror Matter, for example, is a film consisting of a fictional, visual meditation about contemporary science from a retro-futurist perspective. The film begins with a digital rendering of the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan, which depicts water pools inside a cylindrical tube filled with mirrors, through which reflections of neutrinos are produced to achieve the speed of light. The slow, panning movement gives a sense of the immensity of the nearly 13,000 photo-multipliers that inhabit this strange vessel. Another frame depicts the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which is the largest particle accelerator and also the biggest scientific facility on the planet. Its architecture, envisioned through LIDAR scans, produces a dynamic, transparent imprint in three dimensions. The work also documents and at times imagines the processes at the LHC.

The figure/myth of the mermaid is a focal point. But it is also my body, which works to measure different scales of space and time.

My architectural interventions also seek to destabilize the white-cube gallery space. When I was filming in a submarine dock, I wanted to place a pool within the installation, to further invite viewers into the process of production. By placing the black-mirror liquid ceiling within the installation, I added new narratives. This forces viewers to distance themselves from the clear demarcations we expect from the white cube. There are manifolds within quotidian experience and we must create the experience of this in our work.

ES: I want to give time and space for the viewer to walk into these landscapes and explore. And to raise questions instead of giving answers. For me, it is important to see contemporary, scientific structures distanced and to see them already as ruins. I am not trying to praise the scientific process, but rather to question it and re/contextualize this epoch within mythology. I propose a new geo-strata created by visualizing current geopolitical actions.

From the Soviet ruins of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant to the ancient tombs of the Etruscans, from the Andra nuclear fuel repository under France to the atomic deserts and abandoned mines of New Mexico—my film Burial takes us deep into the earth, not only past the thin crust of surface beneath us but also into time: technological, geological, metaphysical. It follows the cycle of power, the fire of creation and destruction, through dreamy sunscapes to the shadowy underlands where we bury both the dead and the apocalyptic wastes of our progress.

Arc welders slice off piece by piece the blades of nuclear reactors from the remains of Chernobyl’s twin-sister plant in Lithuania while a python slithers and curls over its abandoned control room. Remnants from the dying burst of a supernova six-billion years ago, uranium journeys from extraction to production to finally the spent fuel rods that end their loop. They are then hidden back into the earth, a radioactive grave with poison burning a half-life of 159,000 years. The mines and plants and repositories resemble the graves of our ancestors. As Robert MacFarlane wrote, “Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.” A cycle, an eternal return, another snake eating its tail.

The project Sounds from the Desert features Sun Ra Arkestra musician Abshalom Ben Shlomo walking us through a tectonic feature in the Negev desert that separates the Arabian plate and the Sinai sub-plate. Through the personal history of Abshalom, starting from his early life in Chicago in the 1960s, where he was born in wartime, the descendent of slaves, the film explores the developing intersection of African and American culture with elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, and magic realism with Black Hebrew diaspora cosmologies, all as we travel through the cosmos with him as an African-American refugee, legendary jazz musician, and spiritual searcher.

And again my film Sirenomelia, in which I performed as a siren, I linked the past and future by exploring the memory of Etruscan cemeteries, a nuclear power plant in Lithuania (twin sister of Chernobyl AES), Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan, the Antimatter Factory, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Duga (Soviet, over-the-horizon) radar, and a Cold-War submarine base above the Arctic Circle. I read recently in Gregory Benford’s book Deep Time that "deep time is as much the province of the poet as the scientist," and truly I'm interested in seeing it in every way possible.