SARAH BERNSTEIN

This video piece is from an ongoing body of work that explores, deconstructs, and reimagines the accounts and legacy of the Rocky Mountain Locust plagues. This video presents an original folk song written in a poetic and deconstructed first-person voice.

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The song is inspired by the imagined wife or companion of Albert Childs, a judge and meteorologist who stared at the sky for ten days straight, attempting to calculate the size of a locust swarm continually passing overhead. While Childs used an understanding of wind speed and mathematical calculations to develop an understanding of the swarm, I imagine the voice of a second witness to this event. Someone who is also engaged in an act of committed and devotional witnessing but embodies the transcendent, reverential, and incoherent aspects of such an event.

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The video utilizes screen recordings from Stellarium, an open-source planetarium software, recreating the night sky as seen from Plattsmouth, Nebraska during his ten-day vigil in June 1875. These astronomical simulations are paired with electronic compositions, locust recordings, and live harmonium recordings.

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This work exemplifies my interest in working with intentional anachronism and exploring the beauty of slippage: where scientific methodology dissolves into poetic testimony, where agricultural catastrophe becomes American folktale. I am interested in how we collectively handle memory through the tension between recording fact and creating meaning, where digital processes reveal how tools meant for documentation inevitably become instruments of myth-making.