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Over the warble of static, a white sun burns through the black of silhouetted leaves. The concentric rings at the heart of a tree capture the sun’s light, an eerie echo of the larger cosmos.

“Another Rapid Event,” an 8-minute film by moving-image artist and educator Daniel Murphy is a visual meditation on the sun, inspired by both history and emerging science. Recently, it won the Gil Omenn Art & Science Award at the famed Ann Arbor Film Festival. Founded in 1963, Ann Arbor is the oldest avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America and draws filmmakers from around the world.

“With the lineage of artists who have exhibited in that space, it’s very touching to be a part of it,” said Murphy, a lecturer in ��������Ƶ’s Cinema Department.

Murphy finds inspiration in the ways that past events leave unexpected traces in the world, and the meanings that emerge from gaps in understanding. It was his first time presenting at Ann Arbor, although his award-winning films have screened at venues around the world, from Barcelona to Berlin.

“Another Rapid Event” was inspired in part by an 1859 conversation between two telegraph operators stationed in Boston and Portland, Maine, during a massive solar storm.

“The telegraph operators were only able to communicate after removing their devices from their battery sources and using the ambiently harnessed electricity of this storm as their signal,” he explained.

The second half of the film focuses on images of tree rings. Fusa Miyake, a Japanese physicist, discovered a carbon isotope inside tree rings that can be used to date previous solar storms, going back thousands of years in fossilized trees.

“It’s another form of record-keeping that’s occurring inside the piece, where we were able to trace the history of the sun through the hidden information inside of these trees,” Murphy said.

When he began making the film, Murphy pointed his 16 mm camera directly at the sun — with safety precautions, of course.

Befitting a film centered on science, Murphy engaged in a bit of science himself; as part of his artistic practice, he mixes chemicals and develops his own film in a darkroom, he said.

Currently, he’s working on a film centered in a stone chapel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Originally erected in France during the 15th century, the chapel was disassembled and shipped across the ocean to the Marquette University campus, where it now resides. The chapel includes a stone that’s rumored to be slightly colder than the stones around it.

“It’s just kind of embedded into the lore of the space. I’m interested in how that coldness can remain, despite the fact that it’s been dissembled and reassembled on multiple occasions,” he said.