Medium: Mixed
Duration: 4:28 min

As the LHC probed the fundamental forces and forms of subatomic nature, I was probing its nature, grappling with the immense entities that are the apparatuses, and the awesome energies produced within, but also the ephemeral agencies of the subatomic realm they brought forth. I observed the physicists observing the rarefied forms revealed through these mediating machines; but I also intervened, adding barely detectable fragments of art to the science, in the spirit of experimentalist Ian Hacking’s edict “Don’t just peer, interfere!”. As well as working with the physicists, extracting expressive qualities from the devices and data, manifested through both light and sound, a large part of my practice was in collaborating with the detectors themselves. These megalithic machines can be seen as beings, with their own personalities and idiosyncrasies, and as historian Peter Galison states, they are the physical manifestations of the material culture and genealogy of microphysics, they are the keys to the realm of the subvisible. I kind-of inherited an old linear accelerator which I revived, experimentally bringing it back to life through “energy analogies”, re-tuning it and turning it into a giant synthesizer triggered by particle emissions from decaying fruit. In challenging the rarefied realm of particle physics from within, a provocation is materially manifested through these interventions – where does the science end and the art begin?

Song of the Phenomena courtesy DARKLAB

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