UPDATE: Uninterrupted is not showing on Celebration of Light nights (July, 29, Aug. 2, Aug. 5). The start time will also change to 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 15th. Uninterrupted runs Tuesday to Saturday and ends Sept. 24.
It’s dusk and the salmon are swimming towards their spawning grounds.
The crowd of people standing under the Cambie Bridge — necks craned, mouths agape — is swimming with them.
It’s an awe-inspiring spectacle.
Five nights a week from now until late September, filmmaker Nettie Wild’s art installation, Uninterrupted, will be projected onto the underside of the north side of the bridge. It’s one part film spectacle and one part technological marvel, adding up to a spellbinding whole. And it’s free.
If Tuesday night’s crowd, which gathered at Coopers’ Park, had been watching the slow-motion underwater film on television, the ballet-like footage likely would have been interesting for 10 minutes or so. But when it’s projected onto the bridge over False Creek, the juxtaposition of nature, art and urban reality created an unexpected connection with both the fish on the “screen” and the people standing there with you.
Uninterrupted undoubtedly manipulates this sense of oneness to make a point, but it does so in such a way that’s not a stark political call to action. No “Save Our Salmon” placards needed. Instead, by having us “swim with the fishes,” Uninterrupted makes us feel part of the natural world and, as a result, makes us want to protect it.
Salmon once did swim in False Creek. Today, anyone who comes in contact with its water is advised to wash their hands because of the high E. coli levels. In displacing the natural world to create our homes, we’ve not only hurt the salmon, but ourselves.
We feel the impact of this long before the only words in the 25-minute presentation appear on the bridge’s cement surface. After watching the salmon swim up B.C.’s Adams River, spawn and die, images of a far different world appear: hundreds and hundreds of condo lights turning on and off. The presentation ends with a mesmerizing image of a baby salmon wriggling within the confines of a translucent egg. We read “Keep the cycle… Uninterrupted” before the applause breaks out.
Wild is the installation’s artistic director; the director is Michael Brockington; and the hauntingly evocative soundtrack was composed by Owen Belton.
The special underwater camera was provided by North Vancouver’s Clairmont Camera. It can shoot 2,200 frames a second, compared to a regular camera’s 24 frames a second.
“When you put [the camera] under water, all of a sudden the light as it glints through the water turns into slow moving, extraordinary exploding diamonds,” Wild told the North Shore News. When a fish attacks another fish, “at that speed, a second turns into two minutes of film — and in that two minutes of film you see a fish’s tail carve water like it’s a sculpture. You actually see one fish looking at another. You actually see a whole world that exists, but to the normal eye you can’t see it. And that’s what we are bringing to the bridge.”
Her company, Canada Wild, created a proprietary editing system and a computer-generated bridge to digitally map the salmon images. Using virtual reality, Wild and her team wore specialized goggles to edit the film and get a sense of what the finished product was going to look like.
With files from the North Shore News.
