Suspended In A Sunbeam

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Suspended In A Sunbeam explores the liminal space—between light and darkness, signal and silence, the known and the unknown. Inspired by NASA's Voyager 1 mission, which launched on September 5, 1977, and carried a golden record of Earth's sounds, images, and thoughts into the cosmos, the work reflects on humanity’s unintended broadcasts into space.

On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 captured the now-famous image of Earth as a pale blue dot, a tiny speck suspended in a sunbeam from nearly 6 billion kilometers away. In Carl Sagan's words, this distant view of our planet echoes "our joys and sufferings, both lived and imagined," transmitted into the vast void. Suspended In A Sunbeam asks: What if someone, or something, could hear us? What stories would our transmissions tell?

Through the lens of a pop culture Greek tragedy, an interstellar soap opera unfolds. This series of 24-30 images and a short film reimagines the 20th century—its monumental events, cultural icons, and moments of collective memory. From the 1936 Berlin Olympics to the moon landing, the work blurs the boundaries between history, mythology, and fiction, casting our shared past as a cosmic performance.

Each print in the series is a photograph of the projected piece of film, capturing the space between the lens and the projection itself. The installation immerses visitors in beams of light cutting through mist, inviting them to explore this transitional space—where light transforms into form. The images viewed are not static but represent a moment suspended in the interplay between materiality and ephemerality.

This atmospheric and multi-sensory experience invites the viewer to engage with a narrative that spans time and space, reflecting both the monumental and the mundane. The installation becomes a meditation on the human condition, a journey through the space where light travels, and where our collective memories and stories persist—entangled with the unknown.