Ryan Murray

Space Helmet is aesthetically inspired by a 1950s B-movie view of the possible future. This sculpture features a globe turned into a space helmet, used for a performative planetary landing, and finally displayed as a television. As a child, I was certain that by my adulthood, the human race would have succeeded in landing on many of the planets and moons in our solar system. In my adulthood, economics, politics, priorities, and public interest have conspired to make that potential human achievement seem more and more like an impossible fantasy. In this video sculpture, I imagine what we might say for posterity if we were to land on another world.

Perfect Pixels is a video sculpture series in which the Rule of Thirds intersection pixels of classic films are highlighted and magnified on four wall-mounted screens. Each installation of the series displays the perfect pixels from a film that won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, showing the entire runtime of the film in a loop. Marked with the Rule of Thirds guidelines, the otherwise blank wall serves as the remainder of the film’s aspect ratio.

The Rule of Thirds is the compositional principle that divides an image into thirds vertically and horizontally. Cinematographers align subjects along those guides to create the most visually interesting composition. The points where these lines intersect are said to be the most visually powerful in the composition. Drawing this idea to its logical conclusion, the exact pixels at those points should be the most perfect pixels throughout the entire film.

The individual pixels are so small that you might not be able to see them blinking. But when they are magnified, they become colored flicker films, charged with the most important visual information in their original source film.