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Installation views, Chisenhale Gallery London 2004
Available for Exhibition - email: admin AT brighter DOT org
Working to Scale - Steven Bode 2004 (extract - full text in Outside Inside )
Twenty kilometres outside Geneva, in an enclave of neutral Switzerland that has grown to become one of the main intellectual stamping grounds of the international scientific community, are the laboratories of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, also known as CERN. Although the organisation's boundary-breaking activities have attracted increased attention in recent years, the nature and extent of what goes on there is still largely unknown or unfathomable to the majority of people. Not that the buildings themselves give much of a clue. Set in its green-field site in an otherwise anonymous suburban hinterland, the exterior of the complex offers scant indication of either its purpose or its scope. But, as advanced-level science so often reminds us, appearances can be deceptive. Like a metaphor for the mysterious world of sub-atomic particle physics, CERN's distinguishing features are not to be found on the surface but remain to be encountered deep within.
It is only in the passage from outside to inside that CERN reveals its extraordinary, supra-human scale. In a network of underground chambers and tunnels that stretches to the nearby French border and beyond, some of the biggest machines on the planet are trained on the study of the smallest elements of matter. Foremost among these are CERN's famous particle accelerators vast circular tunnels, where streams of protons are accelerated to phenomenal energies, along beam-pipes encased in giant electromagnets. Straddling the largest of these tunnels, as if marking the next stage in a steepening descent into the underworld, is a newly constructed, colossal chamber. This gaping void is the site for one of CERN's latest state-of-the-art devices, a gigantic particle detector named after the mythological figure of Atlas. The detector will act as the receptacle for a series of miniature Big Bangs, in which the fall-out caused by billions of sub-atomic particles colliding will be studied for further insights into the fundamental properties of matter's underlying structure.
........Andrew Stones' ... Atlas (commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and first shown at Chisenhale Gallery in London in 2004), charts some of the farthest reaches of the complex in a vivid and elliptical multi-screen portrait that not only renders the architectural immensity of the site but, equally skillfully and intriguingly, captures something of the intellectual force-field in which it operates. Orbiting around the cavernous maw of the Atlas vault, then picking up speed along the breakneck curves of a particle accelerator, the piece also detours to visit less obvious locations, including the offices of two of the centre's research scientists. Within these surprisingly cramped inner sanctums, Stones' camera records another pile-up of matter, in which every available centimetre of desk, shelf and floor space is buried under a white-out of paper. If there is order here, it is hard to discern, other than as the material agglomerations of a rarefied, uninterrupted milieu of high-powered abstract thought. Counterpointing inside and outside, conflating physical and mental space, Stones' deft juxtapositions draw out a host of connections. In the shadow of an architectural undertaking whose overwhelming size and ambition invites comparison with some of the wonders of ancient history, and in an echo of a wider epistemological project whose pursuit of celestial knowledge increasingly resembles a mirror image of the Tower of Babel, little wonder that he alights on these precarious ziggurats of paper, expressions of that impulse in spontaneous, miniature form.
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Switching from screen to screen, constantly modulating its centre of gravity, Stones' installation often reads like a controlled experiment in the variables of scale and perspective. Over time, like eyes adjusting to the dark, our response to the piece (and its mapping of space) subtly changes. Moving backwards and forwards within the compass of the seven separate screens, little details start to loom large. A chalk-marked equation stands out on a blackboard; which, in turn, evokes the black hole of the detector chamber in which this theorem might shortly come to be tested and validated. The motion-blur of the high-speed ride through the accelerator tunnel settles into a perceptual loop of lingering, accumulating impressions. Time and space become shifting and fluid. Passing unobserved through these strangely unpopulated locations, we look on; and, as we do so, are reminded of one of the paradoxes of the physical universe at its smallest sub-atomic scale: how observation confirms the nature of what we see there, but how the act of observation itself so often changes the reality of what we see ...
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... Stones' fluency with sound adds another element to the mix. Where the video sequences loop and pivot in regular and predictable orbits, sound squalls in waves across the gallery space. Pulsating from sources that are hard to pinpoint, running in and out of phase with the visuals, it red-shifts and ricochets across the room, or emits a ghostly rumble, like subsonic, tectonic activity. In the same way that the granular qualities of the video image become part and pixel of his subject matter, Stones' use of sound is absolutely integral, creating an ambience of indeterminacy that not only establishes the conditions of the work but also guards against too fixed and singular a reading ...
Leading-edge science, and the work conducted at its frontier outposts, usually falls so far beyond our everyday experience that it is easy to defer to its higher authority or become seduced in the contemplation of its uncanny, otherworldly qualities. Reluctant to settle for the role of spectator, and always looking to establish his bearings in this unfamiliar universe, Stones highlights a feeling of ambivalence that often accompanies an encounter with many of these sites. Atlas sums up that ambivalence exactly, conveying the continuing aura of scientific will-to-knowledge but leaving us with the nagging suspicion that as close as we may get to the heart of the matter, we will still always be somehow on the outside... (© Steven Bode 2004)
Atlas was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery London
Atlas was made possible through generous access to facilities
and spaces at:
CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire)
Thanks to Renilde Vanden Broek; Rossano Giachino; John Ellis
Research funded through a NESTA Fellowship
NESTA is the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts,
the organisation that invests in UK creativity and innovation
Steven Bode is Director of Film and Video Umbrella, one of Britain's leading agencies for the commissioning and production of artists' film, video and new media work. http://www.fvumbrella.com