Detectives of the Invisible: Towards a Cosmological Listening Practice or How to Hear Elusive Particles

At the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid I become very interested in ongoing unknowns related to our planet and its position within the universe. I discover a large percentage of invisible matter, surrounding our everyday existence, is yet to be fully understood. Known as dark matter, despite arguments that the term ‘transparent’ is a better fit, I quickly become fascinated by the idea of an elusive, missing mass holding galaxies (including ours) together. Whilst, what are known as planned detection experiments aim to reveal further details of this mysterious substance, its particle nature is unknown(3). Gravitational evidence from early astrophysical and cosmological optical observations, found in the work of Vera Rubin and her team in the 1970s, proves there is an unexplained phenomenon in the form of an unseen mass which inhibits stars from flying off into the galaxy. As physicist Lisa Randall notes ‘billions of dark matter particles pass through each of us every second. Yet no one notices […] they are there. The effect of even billions of dark matter particles on us is miniscule’ (2015, p.20). At once a conundrum for new physics and a totally mundane proposition as our everyday lives unfold completely ignorant of this imperceptible milieu.

A number of international collaborations are currently invested in direct detection efforts to better understand the particle nature of dark matter(4). Within this context I am intrigued to discover several experiments are turning to the sonic. I have based my research stay in Spain for this reason. As part of my project, I undertake two field visits to research groups whose approach to dark matter detection makes use of sound or listening in some way. The first is to the Canfranc Underground Laboratory where, deep underneath Mount Tobazo in the Pyrenees Mountains, cosmic silence is cultivated to reduce noisy interference from cosmic rays and other sources of terrestrial background signal. The second is to the Laboratory of Acoustics for the Detection of Astroparticles at the Polytechnical University in Gandía who use hydrophones, deep below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, to listen in on collisions between high energy particles(5). Science historian Cyrus C.M. Mody writing about the role of listening in relation to the work of science laboratories is adamant that ‘listening, hearing, attuning, and other ear-work are integral to much that goes on’ (2005, p. 176). Mody also makes a claim that sound is bound up in the embodied knowledge produced in laboratory settings and calls for thicker descriptions to make more of how sound is used by science in order to gain insight into ‘issues of situated and embodied knowledge’ (2005, p.193) within experimental settings. Indeed, whilst artistic residencies have increasingly turned their focus towards current advances in physics (see, for example Arts @CERN) to date the majority of projects make use data sonification to represent scientific research(6). The lived and situated experience, connected to sonic-driven scientific experiments, as refracted through creative account-making remains undocumented.  

Whilst we may never truly get a feel for the minute alterations within our surrounding environs, nothing prevents us from imagining how energy exchanges operate at imperceptible scales. I take inspiration from Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, who ask, ‘What if we reinitiate the problem of physics as a problem of feel?’ (2016, p.31) Equally, I’m invested in more affective approaches to invisible matter, building on what audio theorist Douglas Kahn has noted. Kahn states that it is much easier to empathise with living creatures that have eyes and limbs (sentience and technics), or with objects as these occupy fairly stable locations than with ever-moving nondescript energies (2013, p.17). Surely some emancipatory potential can be harnessed by thinking and embodying approaches that linger alongside that which is at the limit of the perceivable? I consider how to practice and conduct listening in this way and how this might be a form of response-ability, that Donna Haraway advocates for (2016).  Equally, I find affiliation in the work of Jane Bennett on ‘The Sonorous Cosmos’ (2001, p. 166) and ‘Ethical Energetics’ (ibid., p.131) where the latter, as noted by Brandon LaBelle in Sonic Agency (2018), pushes for a form of listening as agency. Bennett notes how, through listening, we can access the ever-changing relations around us. Bennett encourages we attune ourselves to an ethics of energetics as she states ‘Through sound, through the various refrains we invent, repeat, and catch from nonhumans, we receive news of the cosmic energies to which we humans are always in close, molecular proximity’ (2001, p. 168). If we reorientate ourselves toward the multiple energies in circulation and proximity to our own, perhaps we can rework the current energy paradigm. Political scientist Cara New Daggett queries the endless human desire for energy claiming that ‘A genealogy of energy suggests that there are other ways of knowing and living energy, and that energy and work can be decoupled.’ (2019, p.11). I think of these positions as potential grounds for a cosmological listening practice.

I begin to consider, during my research residency at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, if it is possible to train our senses to perceive elusive particles. I pursue this query over several months in a variety of formats. I listen in to qualitative talks on the history of dark matter; I lend an ear to conversations at dark matter conferences; I read popular science texts; I set up a four-part interdisciplinary seminar series; I curate a workshop for artists and scientists in the rural Basque country; I watch YouTube videos created by investigators at the Institute: I attune to the post-seminar gossip: I hang out at weekly coffee meet ups and in the corridors of the building. I read outreach posters aloud into my recording device. I dialogue with my host for the project, dark matter investigator, Dr David Cerdeño. At some point, Cerdeño and I formulate the question ‘Can we listen to dark matter?’ In doing so, we forge a tentative link between technological apparatus used in dark matter detection techniques, figuring such setups as sensorial extensions able to complement our habitual perceptive capabilities(7). We use this proposition to structure a series of collaborative talks at science museums and high energy physics training schools. We are finding crossovers between sound/listening studies and physics(8). In March 2023 I use this provocation to structure my exhibition Listening to Dark Matter (2023) where sound art, also very much an invisible medium, is the protagonist(9). 

I situate this project within planetary studies whereby the terrestrial, and the disciplinary are reconsidered. I’m drawn to a planetary framework to embrace uncertainty and relationality thereby disturbing hierarchical distinctions and pre-supposed subjects e.g., humanity, the West etc. By collating this minor composition of practices I’m invested in unearthing creative articulations that redirect energies (human and nonhuman) to, in turn, redirect our collective imagination. I’m drawn to the planetary and the planet, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes, the planet is situated ‘in the species of alterity, belonging to another system’ (2003, p.73) one I believe to be open to intuitive and cross-disciplinary thinking outside the logics of capitalism. Or, as human geographer Oli Mould notes, ‘planetary thinking contains within it praxes that can more readily critique-and mobilise action against […] hegemonic and colonial thinking’ (2023, p. 2). I write this text against a backdrop of unprecedented and multiple humanitarian and displacement crises in what feels like a timely and opportune moment to reconsider the underside of science. 

Energies, not forms, not figures (chant)

Cosmic proportions abound

Stay to sift and sieve molecules til morning

Not a molecule, no

An atom

An invisible atomic component

A neutrino

Dark matter?

It’s seasonal some will say

A laugh secludes security

Ideas illuminate points on a line

Concerns quiver 

Dust free for now

II. Vibratory Potential 

A faded A4 colour printout of Mater [Materia] (1912) by Italian futurist, Umberto Boccioni sits alone in a pale grey acid-free archive box (No.4 of 4) from Parameters for Understanding Uncertainty (P4UU). For over a year the printout of Mater is blue-tacked to the wall of B14, the office I occupy on the ground floor of the Theoretical Physics Institute. An integral aspect of my approach to the research project is to inhabit and make use of this office on a daily basis. From B14 I attune and aurally attend to the nuances of the scholars, administrators, and senior managers researching contemporary conundrums at the forefront of new physics. Their everyday rhythms, frustrations, and successes score the background of my time in the building. I imagine the printout twitching as I write, my attention attuning to the images’ details now imprinted on my mind’s eye. The central figure, Boccioni’s Mother, is surrounded by shards and fragments all containing smaller images. Voluminous yet untethered; a red ghost-like horse moves across the right knee of the central figure (strangely portentous given the circumstances of the artists death in a riding accident). A red ghost-like man walks across the left-hand side in the opposite direction. Part of a house sits on the top right-hand side with two doors. This is an image in motion, a vibratory picture filled with orange, red, green and blue tones. Memories, turbulences, and traumas orbit the mother figure who sits in the middle visibly perturbed by the swirling forces. The work feels like a pictorial reminder of how, as Randall notes ‘ordinary matter – such as that contained in stars, gas and people – constitutes only 15 per cent’ (2015, p.13) and yet, such phenomena greatly influence our feelings – the recognisable figures and forms that constitute a life dance and haunt the central figure.

Immaterial memories are rendered material through the medium of paint. A kind of transduction which hints at the idea that all life experience is imprinted either onto your body or onto the atmosphere you occupy. For art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Boccioni’s Mater is considered, alongside Francisek Kupka’s Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors (1912), as exemplifying vibratory modernism (2013). This, broadly speaking, describes how emergent discoveries within science and technology of the nineteenth and twentieth century, such as electromagnetism and thermodynamics, were depicted in art and science. What links these two paintings, according to Henderson, is a shared concern for pictorially depicting the ether. From the early 1900s up until about 1930 the ether (also spelt as aether) was an unknown substance that filled all space. It was generally thought of, as science historian Bruce Hunt notes, a ‘thin elastic solid or “jelly” stretching across interstellar space’ (2002, p.100). Many physicists of the time were optimistic it would, as Hunt indicates, ‘link together everything in the Universe’ (ibid., p.99). The electromagnetic field, closely related to the ether, became the successor to the majority of its functions. Eventually the ether was scientifically disproved as a fictional construction. That said, the idea of invisible energies coursing through individuals, sites, and situations still lends itself to the artistic imagination. Boccioni considered the futurist painter a clairvoyant of sorts, one able to connect with invisible vibrating forces. This is the technique he applies to the portrait of his mother evidencing, through painterly techniques, the ethereal formations in circulation around an individual. 

The idea that memories of moments lived can reverberate beyond our individual experience of them and be untethered to strict chronological time is explored extensively in Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being. In these posthumously published autobiographical writings Woolf questions whether ‘things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds’ (1978, p.78). Taking this further still, she ponders whether these things are ‘still in existence?’ (ibid.,) Woolf gestures to the idea that certain sensuous experiences endure, often accruing significance and mixing with moments from other times. A stretchy membrane of sorts accessible through memory. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’, the first essay in the volume, Woolf gives an account of her early years, predominantly spent at St Ives in Cornwall, through a sequence of impressions. If she had been a painter, she postulates, she would have made ‘a picture of curved petals, of shells, of things that were semi-transparent’ (ibid., p.76). She desires the creation of ‘large and dim’ (ibid., p.76) versions of these items, without clear outlines. Woolf also wished to include sound in these images claiming ‘sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions’ (ibid., p.76). She cites the cawing of rooks, the sound of waves breaking, and the splash of a wave drawing in again. These sonorous traces, taken from her infancy and childhood, are so vividly described it is as though they caress her as she writes.

Stretchy gelatinous descriptions of childhood replay as aural effects as though plucked from the ether. Sound, and the quality of audition, receives specific attention as she describes how ‘the quality of air above Talland House seemed to suspend sound, to let it sink down slowly, as if it were caught in a blue gummy veil’ and earlier, when qualifying the sound of the rooks’ caw, she describes how ‘sound seems to fall through an elastic, gummy air; which holds it up; which prevents it from being sharp and distinct.’ A penetrable stretchy membrane of sorts. Woolf’s attention to sound and listening is a constant and occurs throughout the writing. This includes reference to hearing voices, her mothers in particular. At one point she speculates whether there might, in the future, be a technology that enables you to fit a plug to the wall ‘and listen in to the past’ convinced that ‘strong emotion must leave its trace’ (ibid., p.78). She is quite convinced of these traces being available as the main question she poses is not whether they exist but how to re-attach ourselves so we can ‘live our lives through from the start’ (ibid.). 

'Her nonsensical stuff invades your everyday, swirling all around, a constant hum that won’t go away, indeed, in existence from our very first days, our very first hours, our very first minutes, our very first seconds, indeed, indeed, indeed long before they were even called HOURS. MINUTES. SECONDS. Y3AH. an ongoing drone of discontent falling over and over and over again on deaf ears. AND GUESS WHAT there are still trillions and trillions and trillions of her zipping through your little nose right now. AND in the middle of the night barely audible articulations erupt in peaks and troughs, quote she is seasonal unquote, a position impossible to re-approve. DON’T WORRY. Only weakly interacting. Y3AH. Low energy remnants. OKAY. Soft presence. Y3AH. Dedicate, dedicate, dedicate, decades in international collective attempts. NOTE: She eludes the exact pinpointing of a place. Remember parameters help by precisely gesturing to where she is NOT, finding out more nothings will lead to somethings, quote nothing will come of nothing unquote.' 

[field recording Canfranc Underground Laboratory]

III. Writing / Reading to Displace / Disrupt

In the early 1970s performance artist and poet Hannah Weiner, a member of the Language poetry movement, began to receive a form of dictation she termed clairvoyance(10). Her writing practice operated as testimony to this act. She claimed she began to see and receive words as though etched ‘on my forehead IN THE AIR on other people on the typewriter on the page’ (2014, p.7). The use of capitals or italics indicates the words as they appeared to Weiner(11).  The book is full of everyday, mundane experiences from her personal life yet also reads, to some extent, as a catalogue for the countercultural movements of the era. Her social interactions with well-known artists on the scene at the time such as Phil Niblock, Bernadette Mayer, Steve Reich, John Cage and Charles Bernstein (amongst others) feature heavily. In a film on Public Access Poetry TV Weiner reads the work aloud with Sharon Mattlin and Peggy De Coursey indicating the intended choral tri-vocal style of the writing(12). Her overarching experience of clairvoyance was such that it caused her to state, ‘words see us’ and ‘we are spoken by language’ (Ibid., p.129). 

Weiner’s clairvoyance can be considered, as literary critic Judith Goldman notes, as a ‘technique for estranging the normalcy that mystifies us’ (2001, p.122) causing us to question the extent to which language arrives to us and is given voice. For Alan Ramón Clinton, in line with Weiner’s earlier clairvoyant works The Fast (1992) and Weeks (1990), her practice operates as a form of capitalist critique toward how certain subjects are produced and conditioned by the system their lives unfold within (2012). This is acutely clear in the passage where she tries to resist buying a pair of pants whilst, simultaneously, the Apollo-13 rocket launch is taking place.

DOWN at the door so OK I go see these maroon velvet pants I’m

not BUY $40

pants BLOOMINGDALES all over again I leave GO TO

COUNTDOWN: refuge,

get in a taxi, start for home, no peace, get out GO TO

COUNTDOWN ok it’s only

money go back and buy the pants it’s better than seeing GO TO

COUNTDOWN

for the rest of my life peace so they fit well.

Weiner offers, via the multi-vocal approach and textual interjections on the page, a form of disruption to the reader, perhaps what can even be described as a radical disruption, to the act of reading and what it means to be read. Weiner states:

When I see words I am also able to know, by reading or handling a book, as example, if an author is a friend, what her illness is, what books she prefers whether she knows what to do for herself, whether to read her at all. … clairvoyantly I am the other to myself … In my nonclairvoyant work there is no person. (Weiner, 1991)

One of Weiner’s main claims here, as noted by liberal arts scholar Patrick Durgin, is to position subjectivity not as ‘an entity but [as] a dynamic’ (Durgin, (2004) p.4 citing Lyn Hejinian (2000) Language of Inquiry, p. 203). This position was shared and actively explored at the “Symposium on the Person”, part of which was subsequently published in Poetics Journal (issue 9, 1991) whereby the figure of ‘the person’ was discussed as distinct from the ‘self as self-same entity’ (ibid). In Weiner’s work, experience is separated from notions of individual intention. The ‘person’ is considered another element in the world, one who is also subject to the indeterminacies of that world, or as I might add, the planet. To return to Oli Mould’s discussion of the planetary, as referenced in the introduction, ‘planetary thinking […] recognises our material and psychological intimacy with the living atmo/bio/eco-sphere around us’ (2023, p. 6). Whilst worthy of a longer discussion, ultimately Weiner’s approach to writing as a form of documentation for her non-intentional indeterminate encounters with words seeks to displace the subject, sense-making, and how knowledge operates. 

For the purposes of this essay, by debunking the notion of the subject, and through closer alignment with the nonhuman and the planetary, I want to suggest it is possible to get closer to thinking otherwise about how/who we are in the world and the relations and hierarchies that structure our interactions. Social scientist Akwugo Emejulu in Fugitive Feminism (2022) queries the usefulness of human as category. Emejulu is predominantly building on the work of Sylvia Wynter and Katherine Mckittrick (2015) who question ‘what it means to be human and, more important, how we might give humanness a different future’ (2015, p.10). Throughout her book Emejulu adopts a bricolage approach interweaving the legacies of thinking by Black studies scholars with autobiographical detail. In doing so she lingers on what it might mean to not belong to the category of the human and, ultimately what it might mean to be free. She cites Combahee River Collective, who state, ‘If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression’ (1983, pp.264-74 cited in Emejulu, 2022, p.23). Emejulu relinquishes desire to identify with the category of human given the depth of corruption and hierarchical structures such a naming implies. Ultimately pointing to how the invention of category and the invention of race is ontologically vacuous. 

For Denise Ferreira da Silva, writing in relation to Moten and Tsang’s physics-related performance project Gravitational Feel in the accompanying publication Who Touched Me? asks:  

Why not assume that beyond their physical (bodily and geographic) conditions of existence, in their fundamental constitution, at the subatomic level, humans exist entangled with everything (animate and inanimate) else in the universe. (2016, p.43) 

Indeed, the notion of ‘separability’ (italics in original, ibid.,43), a term that Ferreira da Silva goes on to analyse becomes, as she states, problematic, in terms of being a ‘privileged ontological principle’ (ibid.). If we think beyond separating humans from nonhumans, the actions, habits, products and processes attached from what we have come to associate with the human then we really begin to disrupt and question ethical practices. This, of course also requires a shift in knowing and thinking, a move beyond determinacy in the Cartesian sense where the mind holds the power of determination or knowing as a kind of ‘efficient causality’ (ibid.).

Speak this text aloud AND only in the absence of dust AND ideally in cosmic silence. 

A LANGUAGE gathers in the depths, under water, under mountains, under ice. Grab a pen, a notepad, set up artificial intelligence systems. Saying ‘A LANGUAGE’ is a bold place to start. Strip out the I’s. Ask if we possess notation techniques for the unknown. Strip out the O’s. Maybe first check what is meant by possess. Strip out the U’s. Verify what is meant by UNKNOWN. Wind up watches THEN note the passing of seconds, minutes, hours, months, years. PAUSE. Consider this a collective task. Use LEDs to indicate oxygen levels, CB radios in all vehicles, a hub, control entry and exit. A TIMELY REMINDER: the arrival of the ELUSIVE will not be announced. Ask if we possess the ability to detect. Ask if we are READY. NOTE: a map, when on the wall, indicates clearly where you are, not where you aren’t. Ask if we are STEADY. CONSIDER: What parameters are necessary for something to occur the same way twice? REALISE: If you are uncertain, it is better to surround yourself with even less certainty. WRITE: STAY AWAY from the SURE ZONE on your wrist and above all, beware your epistemic desire. 

IV. Epistemic weariness / wariness

Radical British experimental writer, Christine Brooke-Rose, following her four orthodox novels began to experiment with readers' expectations from 1964 onwards. Brooke-Rose had particular interests in Heisenberg’s quantum physics which ultimately altered her narrative style(13). This is most evident in Such a novel that is not indeterminate in its form yet is about indeterminacy. The novel operates by presenting a reflection on what the act of interpretation does thereby making the reader question how knowledge is implicated in the world around us. To the extent that, in reading Brooke-Rose, we may become wary of our epistemic desires and, indeed, all acts of interpretation. 

In Such indeterminacy and the role of the interpreter comes as a warning to knowing too much. Too much knowledge can be dangerous to meaning and might best be left as undifferentiated potential.  Writing in 1965 Brooke-Rose states ‘it has become a truism that, in sub microscopic terms, the object is affected by the instrument observing it - part of the famous principle of uncertainty which has indirectly affected all our philosophy and all our attitudes.’ (1965, p. 93) Within the text of Such this becomes even more evident:

A principle of indeterminacy applies, compared, I mean, with the determinacy in regard to large numbers of atoms. The moment you try to find out its condition the very process of investigation must disturb it. So with ideas and people, compared to mass ideas, mass people. And causes. (2007, p.363)

One of the central characters of the novel is Larry, who ‘collects silences’ (ibid., p.203). Larry goes through a number of epistemological challenges. The particular twist Brooke-Rose brings is to apply indeterminacy to people. As readers, we follow Larry through a variety of dream states, hallucinations and moments where planets and the orbits of people overlap. Larry goes through medical procedures and other encounters with potential future partners and offspring. Toward the end of the novel, Larry, in dialogue with another character, Elizabeth further evidences the interest of Brooke-Rose in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. 

-Larry, everyone deserves the attention of definitiveness.

-Even if they prefer the uncertainty principle?

-They only pretend to prefer it. While they have to. You used to say that. Someone would come along and find a unified theory that would do away with indeterminate interpretations, you’d say and revert to causality. I thought perhaps you might.

-I thought so too. In psychic terms at least. But I didn’t. In the meantime we do the best we can, some of us preferring to pretend causality exists, and others, others preferring to prefer its absence. But you can never know with absolute certainty that what look like the same particle, with the same identity - 

-Yes but for the practical purposes you have to, Larry, in the chemistry of people. Otherwise how can you live?

-You can’t. Not really. You pretend that you do. To save the appearances.

-Larry, you can’t honestly believe that. (Such, p.387)

In a radio interview, given in late 1965, just after the publication of Such, Brooke-Rose was asked to comment on her use of the Uncertainty Principle within her writing, and the interest of French novelists in the ‘modern world of science’ she states:

The modern scientific concept [is] that any object is affected by the instrument observing it. You can’t actually see an electron jumping from one orbit to another, if indeed it jumps, and …the photon that you’ve got to use is going to affect its behaviour. And I think this is very important in the observation of reality; the moment you start observing it, it shifts. And I think this is a problem modern novelists have to face, that you can’t just make a photograph of the reality immediately around you because it has already shifted by the very process of photographing it, and looking at it. 

The perspective of astrophysics enables Brooke-Rose to combine two scales, namely the planetary and the microscopic. Human behaviours are considered in terms of shifting between being ‘waves and undulations’ (2018, p.273) to the ability of exchanging one’s atoms with someone else's. Emotional states are announced such as one character, Stance’s wife who ‘bombards the spare room with particles of a vague discontent’ (Jordan (2018) p.273 citing Such, p.282) or, another character, Elizabeth who brings ‘particles of her self-absorption’ (Jordan (2018) p.273 citing Such, p.379). Crucial to the novel is the conception of energy that operates ‘both as emotional and thermodynamic’ as human energy is considered in terms of a resource that can waste itself, that which should be organised, and above-all listened to (see Brooke-Rose, 234).

Finally, in ‘Dynamic Gradients’ in London Magazine Brooke-Rose states: 

‘We must evolve a new way of thinking and reject the old universalistic and absolute concepts, especially our habit of identification, just as the scientists have done. If we do not, we shall continue to produce more and more semantic blockages in our nervous systems, more breakdowns in communication, more mental disturbances, in fact we would not be equipped to survive the evolutionary process’ 

(Brooke-Rose, 1965, pp. 89-96 cited in Joseph Darlington, Joseph, 2017, p.154)

The cultivation of a cosmological listening practice, one that is sensitive to shifts in the atmos/bios/eco-sphere or otherwise attuned to the planetary, the intuitive and the emotional ‘ethers’, over the global and globalised capitalistic approaches can potentially do ourselves and our planet a favour. The promise, or premise of an invisible, transparent particle known to exist but as yet able to defy capture offers the tantalizing prospect of questioning our current orders of knowledge. My parting intention, through this exposition of creative thinking companions aims to consider what/how future discoveries might liberate us from old ways of thinking, disciplinary binds and imposed categories.

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