A Gently Tilting Planet

Film by Jennifer Bewerse with multi-channel sound by Tim Feeney and Cassia Streb
Saturday, February 15th, 2025
4pm
Automata Theater (504 Chung King Court, Los Angeles, CA 90012)

Tickets online or at the door

Program Notes

A Gently Tilting Planet is an hour-long video and sound composition tracing the slow, continuous movements of light over a year—the shifting ocean tides, cacti acting as sundials, shadows stretching and retreating in a valley, and weather altering visibility. Over the course of an hour, we see and hear the effects of a single day’s changing light within a shifting environment, presented simultaneously in separate aural and visual tracks.

Saturday’s presentation is a segment of the full work premiering in 2026, a four-channel video piece showing 96 cumulative hours from the 2024 Quarter Days: the Spring and Fall Equinoxes, Winter Solstice, and Summer Solstice. In this initial showing, we see one “Quarter Day” of the four films that make up the full piece.

Jennifer Bewerse’s films are composed of 24 vertical time slices. Each slice plays one hour, in real time, from a 24-hour recording. The accompanying sound is distributed across adjacent speakers of varying sizes and construction, mirroring the shifting light in the film’s vertical stripes.

The piece captures both the barely perceptible and the immense, revealing the passage of time on a planetary scale, grounding us in the vast motion of Earth itself.