"One Thing I Know" by Benedict Schlepper-Connolly was commissioned by the percussion-viola duo of Alex Petcu & Nathan Sherman in 2021, with funds provided by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. Combining floating viola pads over an intricate gamelan groove, the piece gently fuses ambiguous harmony with the propulsion of Berlin electronica.

The title comes from the poem "Eines weiß ich" by Edeltraud Eckert, who was arrested for her opposition to the East German government in 1950, and who died in prison at the age of 24 in 1954. Schlepper-Connolly describes the poem as “absurdly optimistic for a better future”.

Attempting to connect the video with the concept of the piece, we wanted to explore the idea of an imagined set of landscapes. We worked with an existing artificial intelligence to generate a series of new satellite images featuring places that do not exist on Earth. Benedict suggested arranging these across the video in a particular sequence that might evoke a hopeful recovery of nature, going from desert-like landscapes into lush rainforests. The artificial intelligence then analysed the waveform of the track and moved between these images reactively. Once the render was complete, we manipulated the video to get a more textural result that maybe resonates with the idea of a thought – something that could be but is not.