I can hardly bear it when it is over, I can hardly bear it when it starts

Overview

This video utilizes footage from the Arecibo telescope collapse that occurred in Arecibo, Puerto Rico in December of 2020. The Arecibo telescope was the world’s largest single aperture telescope and has produced the strongest and farthest-reaching messages ever transmitted off-planet. The text excerpts featured in this video work are derived from several years of research by the artist surrounding an archive of letters written between science-fiction writer James Tiptree Jr., who was really a woman named Alice Sheldon, and famed author Ursula Le Guin. In this work, Nelson has conflated sentences and sentiments spanning the eight years of correspondence from Tiptree into a single poem that appears as an outgoing and unanswered transmission.