Simon Starling, BLACK DROP CINE’-ROMAN, 2013

In the summer of 2012 Simon Starling created Black Drop, a film that traces a relationship between astronomy and the use of moving image technology typical of early cinema. The artist assumed that the 2012 Venus transit would be the last documented on celluloid (the next transit will take place in 2117), given its gradual production output. This was the starting point to consider the two observations of the transit (that of 1874 and that of 2012) as the brackets that temporally enclose the entire history of cinema in film. Black Drop traces the development of the “photographic revolver”, an instrument invented to safely and accurately resume the imminent passage of Venus in front of the Sun in 1874.
Together with a film crew Simon Starling reached Hawaii and Tahiti to observe and film the transit of Venus in the sites of the previous historical observations and photo-documentation. The book is a photo novel that reconstructs the film frame-by-frame, where the words of the out-of-home voice are reported as a “comment to the images”. Black Drop Ciné-roman tells the relationship between astronomy, photography and the technology of moving images, lowering events into a story of epic journeys and long distances