Earths to come

Description: Earths to Come is a virtual journey, guided by spatialized sound and immersive animation, into the profound depths of a love poem. Painterly, penciled moving images, interweave with original vocal music conjuring a sense of intimate presence to find vastness and insularity in the simplicity of an 8-line poem by Emily Dickinson.

Earths to Come premiered at the 2024 Venice Biennale Cinema Immersive as a communal VR theatre installation. The piece is a collaboration between expanded cinema director, Rose Bond, Grammy winning vocal group Roomful of Teeth, lauded composer inti figgis-vizueta, spatial sound designer Massimiliano 'Max' Borghesi, composite artist Zak Margolis, sound engineer Randall Squires and creative producer Melanie Coombs - each pushing at the edges of their prescribed mediums.

Installation, virtual reality 13 min

Bio: Rose Bond likes to break the frame. Illuminating urban spaces, her past large-scale projections portray stories often overlooked. Installation sites include Toronto, Utrecht, Zagreb, Exeter, New York City and Portland. With roots in independent film, Bond’s paint-on-film animations are held in the MoMA Film Collection and have been screened internationally. Her media projects have received support from the American Film Institute, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Venice Biennale College Cinema Immersive, the Oregon Community Foundation, the British Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Bloomberg LP, the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the National Endowment for the Arts. Canadian born, Bond lives and works in Portland Oregon.

Directors Statement: With roots in film, I see the advances in XR - Extended Reality - as expanding cinema. Immersive media beckons new forms of collaboration between sound and visual artists. For Earths to Come, I do not see my work as illustrating music, nor do I want musicians as my ‘soundtrack’. I am interested in choreographing images in dimensional space – moving 2D drawings into sculpted sound 4D experiences as if in a dance with a sometimes-aloof partner. From inception to performance, my animated sequences were informed by my collaboration with inti-figgis vizueta, and Roomful of Teeth.