Private Project

Eyes Break Into a Thousand Lights

Eyes Break Into a Thousand Lights inhabits the threshold between liquid and light, oscillating between cosmic and cellular scales: whitecap and nebula, neural discharge and ocean foam. The score, microtonal and polyphonic, built from modular oscillators and conceived for deep underwater transmission by Radio Amnion, London, brings a logic of immersion that the image makes visible. The eye becomes a site of sound.

  • Abinadi Meza
    Director
  • Abinadi Meza
    Producer
  • Abinadi Meza
    Composer
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    13 minutes 44 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 1, 2024
  • Country of Origin:
    Mexico
  • Shooting Format:
    16mm
  • Film Color:
    Black & White
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Distribution Information
  • Film-Makers’ Cooperative / New American Cinema Group (New York)
    Distributor
    Country: United States
Director Biography - Abinadi Meza

Abinadi Meza is a Latinx-Indigenous (Otomí - México) artist, filmmaker, and composer. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR). His practice reconfigures cinema as a site of physical and acoustic contact. Using hand-layered 16mm processes, Meza creates an elemental cinema where the film substrate functions as a tactile, metabolic, and synesthetic document.

Meza employs radiophonic signal, electromagnetic phenomena, and frequency interference to develop integrated compositions where sound and image unfold as a resonant body. He utilizes electronic sound masses to produce chromatic depth and luminous transparency; vibrational forces generate dimensional architecture. Through this materialist investigation of thresholds, the work triggers a perceptual sublime.

His media works have been presented at the Walker Art Center, MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, and Blaffer Art Museum. Meza’s films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, Cineteca Nacional de México, FACT Liverpool, MCA Santa Barbara, and international festivals including art + film + vienna, Crossroads, Kasseler Dokfest, and the Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF). His work is distributed by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York.

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Director Statement

Eyes Break Into a Thousand Lights is part of my ongoing Elemental Cinema series. Where that practice has been concerned with color as a perceptual and sensory field, this film isolates light as pure event: black and white as a concentration into luminous form.

The visual world of the film operates at simultaneous scales that refuse to resolve. Molecules and cellular forms read as microscopic biology, as Cherenkov radiation cascades in water, as cosmic debris, as sea foam viewed from altitude. The large sweeping forms are equally indeterminate: tectonic fracture, breaking waves, shattered ice, galactic structure. Light and darkness are both alive. The eye, named in the title, is dispersed across a thousand luminous events.

The score is my composition "Chorion: A Film," composed on analog modular synthesizers and electrified wire for Radio Amnion, a London-based platform that transmits original compositions more than 2.6 kilometers deep into the Pacific Ocean via the calibration system of a submerged neutrino telescope. At that depth, in the Cascadia Basin, rare neutrino interactions cause cascades of ultraviolet light to bloom through the abyssal water. The image world and that phenomenon are the same event at different scales: protean transformation, oceanic depth and cosmic space convening in the dark.