UK art director and Flame/Nuke artist Jola Kudela: “I did an art residency in Devon last year, filming local landscapes and seascapes. I would set out every morning, carrying my camera, tripod, and the rest of the equipment on my back.
“Each day I would pass a narrow path leading up a mountain. It was steep but I felt this mysterious pull towards it and I simply had to climb it.
“When I got to the very top, I saw a strange pile of stones covered in fog. What was this place? I started asking around, and soon discovered it was in fact a holy mountain.
“It’s called Holdstone Down and according to the Aertherius Society it’s the place where Jesus – and by Jesus they mean the Earth’s incarnation of an extraterrestrial Cosmic Master – appeared to their founder, in 1958.
“I did feel a special energy there, some kind of vibration – and that’s what I tried to recreate in my video to the music by Julia Kent.
“Julia’s music, with its haunting basslines and looped harmonies, is eerie and emotional. For me, it speaks of temporality and transience of humans and our habitat, the Earth. It feels quite apocalyptic in a way, but there is also hope in it.”
“I started to explore a collection of opensource shaders for Flame and found a nice effect named pixelsort that lets you stretch horizontally or vertically the lowest or the highest values in your picture.
“So I did it separately, and synchronized it with the music – black tones with the lower sounds of course and high values in the picture with the same in the music; that gave me a metaphoric aspect of the music being created by nature.”
Artist: Julia Kent
Director/editor/VFX: Jola Kudela
Toolkit: Flame