David Clark

David Clark is an award-winning media artist, filmmaker, radio producer, and writer known for interactive works that combine philosophy, storytelling, and experimental media. His internet artworks 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein and A is for Apple are dreamlike interactive essays that weave together narrative fragments, ideas, and digressions to explore how meaning emerges through narrative, poetry, image, accident, and emotion. Clark holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from King’s College in Halifax. His work has been presented at more than 150 festivals and venues worldwide, including Sundance, SIGGRAPH, Transmediale, the European Media Arts Festival, and the Museum of the Moving Image. He has received major awards at FILE (São Paulo), SXSW Interactive, Cinema Tous Ecrans, and others. In 2011 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein received the $25,000 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Award. Clark is Professor of Expanded Media at NSCAD University in Halifax.

ARTWORK

Victory Over the Sun (Video)
This work is an experimental non-linear collage of material collected and processed during a two-week residency involving artists and scientists gathered to watch and discuss the 2026 European Solar Eclipse. The work is a contemplation of how eclipses have marked major culture moments at the fulcrums of cultural change. It involves a cast of characters including Johannes Kepler, Wovoka, Wassily Kandinsky, Albert Einstein, and Georges Bataille. This is a work about the shadow of history, the disappearance of the image, and the contemplation of the invisible.

TALK

Victory over the Sun
David will talk about his new video piece and recent experiences at the Solar Eclipse Artist Residency in Schönbach, Germany in relation to his previous interests in astronomy. The new work contemplates the entangled relationship of eye and the sun. Centred on the strange astronomical coincidence of the eclipse, it considers the paradoxical impossibility of self-consciousness. The work weaves together the story of Kepler’s science fiction thought experiment, Somnium that contributed to his mother’s persecution as a witch, the prophetic vision by that the Paiute mystic Wovoka experienced during a coma during an eclipse, the invention of abstract painting by Malevich stemming from his work on the Russian Experimental theatre piece Victory Over the Sun, and the Solar Philosophy of French Philosopher Georges Bataille.

WEBSITE
www.chemicalpictures.net