Mia Rollins
Somnium (Transmission I)
Named for Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (The Dream) (c.1634), widely considered the first work of science fiction, in which Kepler imagines a trip to the moon, Rollins’ work Somnium (Transmission I) utilizes archival recordings from family videos and voice memos captured throughout their daily life to imagine a conversation between the artist and their father on the moon– or perhaps at the edge of the event horizon. The piece explores the sharing of aspirations between a father and daughter: longing for a sense of self-purpose, a citizen-scientist’s love of all things space-travel, a fascination with documentary filmmaking and video, ambitions for a career in the arts, and desire for connection with the universe. Somnium (Transmission I) posits that some dreams are passed on and inherited like DNA. It embodies the transmission of a promise from one generation to the next: if I don’t get to go to the moon someday, then I’ll make sure you will.
Materials photogrammed for animations:
Ingredients for lunar highlands regolith simulant (anorthosite, glass-rich basalt, Ilmenite, pyroxene, olivine (mineral life is believed to have evolved from)), Cherenkov radiation (from the RINSC nuclear reactor), quartz (key to development of the phonograph due to piezoelectric properties), honeycomb, female eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly, flowers from grandparents' house in TN, rhesus monkey skull (first primate in space, first primate to die in space travel), tomato, waveforms generated from 100 nights of the artist sleeping as recorded with the “Sleep Cycle” App.
Audio: audio/video recordings of the artist and their father spanning 25 years, static generated from 100 nights of the artist sleeping as recorded with the “Sleep Cycle” App linked together into one long waveform and then coded into sound using GNU Octave, shepard scales made from recordings of the artist dancing with their father at their wedding, sampling from NPR Radio Lab episodes, recordings of static and silence from the space shuttle Challenger disaster, stopwatch ticking, synth music, audio from the "image side" of the Golden Record sent out on Voyager Probes 1 and 2 into interstellar space.
Installation Materials: High gloss acrylic dishes from airplane manufacturer, metal armatures fabricated by the artist and built in Nashville, TN by family company, fog, LED flashlights, light.
View full video with audio: https://www.mia-rollins.com/somniumtransmission1
Statement
My work situates itself in the liminal border-space between the physical and virtual, science and magic, humans and technology, and memory and imagination. My practice incorporates archival and investigative video and animation, as well as new media technologies, such as photogrammetry, into large-scale installations. My works investigate our individual relationships with current radical shifts in digital technology and scientific fields. I explore phenomena such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, astro, particle and quantum physics, proposing through them metaphors for memory, dreams, loss and love in the human experience, and extrapolating these connections to imagine a sort of posthuman humanism.
My projects employ various digital fabrication techniques, including scanning, 3D printing, and projection mapping. I combine these techniques with video, new media, and practical projection effects, using my experiments to investigate the divide between the physical and digital, examining memory and loss and how they may be freshly understood through notions of the glitch, degeneration and resurrection. The audio components of my works largely draw from personal, historical, and scientific archival material, adopting mixing and sampling techniques to examine how entertainment media and science culture become entangled with our notions of ourselves, our relationships with technology, and our communication with others.
I have been asking myself these questions: how can we express and embrace our entanglements with the rest of the universe? What potential lies in the ways our systems glitch, our minds break down, and our bodies age? What is lost in the voids between the physical, digital, and spiritual? How do we define what is ‘human’ and how might we encapsulate the ‘human’ experience in other media and forms? How might we communicate through media and form notions of love, grief, and hope across differences, species, or even across planets? How can we grieve what cannot be encapsulated, that which we cannot understand, or that which is lost in translation? And how do we find beauty, even opportunity, in our own inherent entropy?
Mia Rollins (Nashville, TN, 1995) is an internationally exhibited research and installation artist whose work straddles the borders of art, science, and technology. They are currently a Professor of Physics and Engineering at the Community College of RI. Rollins received their B.A. from Brown University in 2017 and M.F.A. in Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design in 2022. Rollins’ international solo exhibition, “Dreams Like Cherenkov” was presented this year at Galerie Siedlarek in Frankfurt, Germany, exhibiting a work made in collaboration with the Rhode Island Nuclear Science Center, researching Cherenkov radiation, gamma spectroscopy, and cosmic radiation.
As a large part of Rollins’ practice is advocating for the incorporation of artists’ perspectives in STEM research, residencies and collaborations with scientific and technological research projects are integral to their practice. Rollins received a NASA SCoPE Seed Grant in 2023 to turn the University of New Hampshire’s Flow Physics facility into a live installation and an interactive VR lesson on flow physics on NASA’s Infiniscope teaching platform. Rollins is also a founding member of the Brown University Space Program, which launched SBUDNIC, a small satellite, into space in June 2022.
@miarollins