Rachel Rose: Everything and More

Everything and More is a video projection with sound that explores the concept of mortality through the out-of-body experience of an astronaut. Presented as a dreamlike sequence of images, it is inspired by science-fiction movies as well as Rachel Rose’s interview with American astronaut David Wolf on his spacewalk experience. Rose interviewed Wolf about his spending 128 days in space aboard the Mir Space Station in 1997. Wolf recalls how being in space enhanced his sense of perception back on earth. In his narration, Wolf recounts the physiological and psychological changes within his body caused by the lack of gravity and weightlessness of space. He describes the heaviness of objects and the weight of his movements, but also other sensations such as odors and touch. His memories and experience of space are overlayed with a distorted sound edit created with an astronomical instrument called a spectrograph, which Rose used to separate sounds from a 1972 performance of American singer Aretha Franklin.

The video was filmed in an astronaut-training facility and neutral buoyancy pool, a large indoor pool of water in which astronauts perform simulated extravehicular activity tasks in preparation for upcoming missions. Using images of an astronaut’s suit helmet, interspersed with footage of crowds at concerts and microscopic renderings of milk, oil and ink, Everything and More is a powerful meditation on human nature as it reflects on sensory stimulation and the perception of transcendental space, the depth of perception, as well as the experience of reality, memory and the cognitive shift in awareness when normative space ceases to exist.