The subtle and beautiful music video for Gosh, from Jammie xx album In Colour. The music video was directed by digital artist Erik Wernquist, with photos by NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.
The video is a slow study of a mars like plant that slowly reveals humans presence and a terraformed surface cut to Jammie xx’s beat. A barren surface gives away to arial images of human infrastructure and space stations that encircle overhead.
Earlier Work
Wernquist early short film “Wanderers” explored many of the same themes about humanities nature to explore and experance, built around beautiful images of space and the cosmos and narration built around an expert from Carl Sagan ‘s “Pale Blue Dot.”
Wernquist described the film as:
…a vision of our humanity’s future expansion into the Solar System. Although admittedly speculative, the visuals in the film are all based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. All the locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available.
– Erik Wernquist
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”
Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon.
Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.
– Carl Sagan, “Pale Blue Dot”
This film was made with use of photos and textures from: NASA/JPL, NASA/CICLOPS, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, ESA, John Van Vliet, Björn Jonsso.