Charles Stankievech
The Desert Turned to Glass

Following this concept of silence, the soundscape is a remix imperceptible to the human ear. It is composed of electromagnetic signals from the ionosphere—a layer of Earth's atmosphere extending roughly 80 to 1,000 kilometers above the surface. Using a specially custom-built antenna, the energy of the "Aurora Borealis," the dynamic flickering of the Northern Lights during an electromagnetic storm from the sun, is captured. These are combined with underwater recordings from the ocean near Cape Canaveral, made with hydrophones, as well as vibrational noise from tectonic movements and volcanic activity.

The film’s title, Eye of Silence, is taken from a surrealist painting by Max Ernst, created during his exile in the United States during World War II. In this work, typical of Ernst's style, an alien, hallucinatory, underworld appears like a psychedelic, deep-dream Fata Morgana — constructed from biomorphic, rock-like architectural forms, reminiscent of today’s AI-generated imaginary worlds.

The central motif in Ernst's painting can be interpreted as an eye, representing a portal. Like craters, it symbolizes the ancient belief in the existence of gates to other dimensions.

It is this painting that science fiction writer J.G. Ballard chose for the cover of his 1966 novel, The Crystal World, representing a story where animals, plants, and humans are transformed by touch into crystalline forms in a timeless existence. This transformation evokes the equally surreal setting seen in Ernst's paintings.

The painting of Max Ernst, J.G. Ballard's novel, and Stankievech’s film and soundscape all diverge and meander between a sense of dystopia and utopia. In each representation of alternative, timeless worlds that dwarf or decenter human beings, human paradigms collapse in distinct ways. Unlike the Romantics, whose subjective expressions of nature’s grandeur still imply a relationship between humanity and nature, these works move away from such relational constructs.

Stankievech’s depiction is neither a pure apocalyptic narrative nor a typical science fiction dystopia. Instead, he portrays creation as it existed before human presence, employing a method of negation. He creates a retrospective vision of Earth imbued with a futuristic sensibility, where humanity is negated in favor of a broader perspective—one that encompasses time, space, unconscious potential, and unknown sensory realms.

In this sense, Stankievech departs from the concepts of his earlier works, such as "LOVELAND," a film shot in the Arctic in 2011 at a military base, where he captured a wandering purple gas cloud moving over icy terrain. In that earlier work, military colonization defined landscapes as troubled and politically fraught, echoing nationalistic geopolitical interests amid the sublime beauty of the Arctic Sea.

Now, in times of collapsing human concepts, he portrays landscapes and the nonhuman world as living, transformative, and resonant entities. As a world on retreat from human touch.