On Listening in to the Scientific Mundane

Abstract

Scientific discovery often makes for a spectacular image or news story, as recent photographs of Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way, evidence. However, the mundane processes of scientific research, with their bureaucratic nuances, unsolvable conundrums, small talk, reporting, meetings, and seemingly inconsequential details, are often undocumented. Between January 2022 – May 2023 Rebecca Collins was artist-in-residence in B14, an office at the Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Throughout the residency period she listened in to the mundane rhythms, atmospheres, and affects circulating among those who are trying to understand what took place in the first three minutes of our universe. She dedicated the majority of her efforts to listening in to dark matter – at once an ongoing scientific conundrum and totally mundane substance.

In Spain, international teams of physicists use specifically designed technological apparatus and laboratories to look for dark matter, an abundant yet elusive undetected particle present in our everyday lives. Field notes from visits to the Canfranc Underground Laboratory, situated below the Pyrenees mountains, and the Laboratory of Acoustics for the Detection of Astroparticles, positioned 2.5 kilometres below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea serve to further reflect on the process-driven efforts of research into new physics. Anecdotes and autoethnographic writing from the situated and subjective experience of the author aims to understand how institutions and individuals dedicated to the investigation of new physics enable the extraordinary and the utterly mundane to coexist. Ultimately, the article considers how interdisciplinary encounters, anecdotes, conversations and site-based accounts constitute a practice-based research methodology that strives for collective practices of uncertainty, and a politics of indeterminacy.

THE SPECTACLE OF SCIENCE

My indeterminate listening practice informs and forms part of ‘Parameters for Understanding Uncertainty’ (P4UU), a research project investigating how methodologies used in artistic research meet those in the physical sciences¹. I dedicate my efforts, within this capacity, to listening in on dark matter – at once an ongoing scientific conundrum and totally mundane substance. I situate this project within what Felipe Cervera describes as a ‘preliminary canon on planetary studies in the critical humanities’ (2017) whereby the terrestrial and disciplinary are reconsidered. A planetary framework embraces uncertainty and relationality disturbing hierarchical distinctions and presupposed subjects, for example, humanity and the West. In this article I develop an argument for the anarchic potential of indeterminacy. I analyse how, after Richa Nagar, ‘the ethics and methodologies of encounters, anecdotes, conversations and storytelling’ serve as a ‘research praxis, a politics of indeterminacy, or a politics without guarantees’ (2014: 13). To do so, I gather textual fragments from my encounters with scientific scholars. I assemble anecdotes, interview extracts and field notes from visits to the Canfranc Underground Laboratory and the Laboratory of Acoustics for the Detection of Astroparticles.

Science is typically linked to the spectacular. Scientific communicators and content creators use newsworthy discoveries to deliver informative bite-size accounts for social media and video streaming platforms. For P4UU I inhabit B14, an office on the ground floor of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, a research-intensive centre on the campus of the Autonomous University of Madrid. In late December 2022, a thread on the institute’s Twitter feed (rebranded to X in July 2023) rounds up the past year’s spectacular scientific achievements (Inst. Física Teórica [@ift_uam_ csic] (2022). May yields images of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive blackhole at the centre of our galaxy. July celebrates the ten-year anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced when quantum excitation occurs in the Higgs field. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) James Webb Space Telescope releases images of faraway galaxies evidencing the curved effect produced by gravitational forces. In October the Nobel Prize is awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their experiments with quantum entanglement. In November, neutrinos (elusive particles that barely interact with other matter) are detected from Messier 77, an active galaxy, 47 million light years away by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory².

Media theorist Lisa Parks, writing in relation to her research on technologies used in astronomy (for example, the Hubble Space Telescope), notes how televisual representations move away from the potential for ‘difference, unknowingness and uncertainty’ (2005: 142) towards the knowable. This, Parks claims, serves to frame probing devices as tactics for remote control and, ultimately, as the means to engender the domestication of outer space into the social imaginary. I want to analyse, through listening, how to move away from representations that frame the unknown as stable and certain. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes, ‘the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system’ (2003: 72). By invoking the planet (rather than the globe) Spivak foregrounds an ‘underived intuition’ (ibid.) that is ‘intricately relational’ and informs the ‘inescapable ecological unity’ of the planet. To approach this, I believe it necessary to foreground the mundane procedures inherent in the daily grind of scientific practices and lengthy logistical processes involved in experiments that, while far from spectacular, are essential to scientific advancement.

Over the past year, as artist-in-residence in B14, an office at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid, I have listened in on scientific investigative processes, bureaucratic procedures and logistical requirements for experiments. To listen in requires a specific kind of attention. I have stretched my ears, attuning to the mundane activities and frustrations of physicists and their respective scientific institutions in their pursuit for the ongoing, unresolved conundrums of what we are yet to know about our universe. As György Lukács states, ‘life is an anarchy of light and dark: nothing is ever completely fulfilled … nothing ever quite ends … nothing ever flowers into real life [which is] always unreal, always impossible’ (2010: 176). It is within the mundane that life’s indeterminacies arise. I want to consider the anarchic potential of such disorder, in the context of P4UU, my interdisciplinary artistic research project, as a means of practising resistance.

LISTENING TO PRACTICE INDETERMINACY

The listener, perhaps not dissimilar to the eavesdropper, occupies an uncertain position, unsure where the direction or orientation of such a practice might lead. In Stolen Voices, a collaborative research project with Johanna Linsley, we analyse the figure of the eavesdropper in relation to Krista Ratcliffe’s etymological excavation of the term (2000). By recombining definitions, Ratcliffe describes eavesdropping as a practice situated ‘on the border of knowing and not knowing … listening to learn’ (2000: 20)³. As Jean-Luc Nancy notes, ‘to be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity’ (2007: 7). I use my listening to engage in a practice of indeterminacy that, different to unpredictability, makes it impossible to second guess what happens next. Causality is not the name of the game here⁴. The influence my listening has on those within the institute is also indeterminate, yet could be said to challenge the hierarchies and status quo of the building.

One afternoon, in early January 2022, a group of ten doctoral students, enthused by my presence, knock on my office door to request I deliver an impromptu presentation. One morning a PhD student draws a chalk diagram on my blackboard to evidence the effect a black hole might have on a body. An email arrives inviting me to a meeting with senior management in relation to a request to install a 9-metre square wooden sculpture inspired by an image of a collision between subatomic particles. In autumn 2022, a faculty member, during a meeting about something else, asks a technician to roll down the projector screen to show their abstract painting works. The same faculty member, at an interdisciplinary seminar I organize, asks when it is appropriate to stop the creative process.

Overall, my listening practice is invested in exercising attention; where to be in listening as much as to be listening in puts me in the role of, as Brandon LaBelle describes, ‘the listener as actant’ (2021: 4). From this position of attentiveness, I give myself over to emergent rhythms, atmospheres and affects to partake in the ‘collaborative work of living’ (ibid.) amid scholars, administrators and senior managers engaged in research into new physics. I make use of my listening to creatively engineer encounters between artists and scientists. I situate my understanding of anarchism in relation to what Jamie Heckert describes as ‘an ethics of relationships’ (2010: 186). Ethics, Heckert continues, in line with Wendy Brown’s (1995) thinking, ‘are always concerned with relationships’ (ibid.). Ethics aim to predetermine how interactions evolve yet the actual work of relating is ‘messy and emotional’ (ibid.). I build on Heckert’s notion of anarchism as a practice of listening as, citing Patrick Whitefield writing about ecology, he states ‘we can only co-operate with a person or a place if first we listen to them’ (2007: 413). The juxtaposition of textual findings emulates my listening practice, which operates akin to what Dina Georgis describes as ‘paradoxical’ in the sense that ‘it attends to being affected but is neither disengaged nor wanting to master what it sees and hears’ (2013: 18). By listening I move away from, as Heckert states, ‘relying on fixed structures and rigid thinking’ to embrace how ‘anarchism [involves] developing a comfort with uncertainty’ (2010: 193). Accordingly, my listening embraces the sensorial potential of the mundane and the scope for unfolding yet-to-be-known thought processes and, as Stuart Hall notes, ‘new historical realities’ (1983: 84).

NO GUARANTEES

Of specific focus are techniques used in the detection of dark matter, an invisible yet elusive substance in abundance in our everyday lives. At once an ongoing scientific mystery and mundane substance holding galaxies (including ours) in place. Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall describes how ‘dark matter constitutes 85 per cent of the matter in the Universe while ordinary matter – such as that contained in stars, gas and people – constitutes only 15 per cent’ (2015: 13). In a public talk by David Cerdeño, my host physicist for the project, he uses the image of a paella dish separated into percentages to evidence this scientific fact. A key question for my project is whether it might be possible to hear, listen in or in some form feel dark matter. In conversation with Cerdeño, he points out that this depends on how we are framing the question of feeling and whether this is considered from a human-centred or physics-based perspective. Randall states, ‘only things that affect us in a detectable way can be observed’ (2015: 15).

In physics, particularly in experiments for dark matter detection, Cerdeño elaborates, this is considered in relation to the forces of gravity⁵. Indeed, the mass of unseen stars and objects in orbit in the centre of the universe can be deduced from their movement revealing, for example, what is now known to be Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the centre of our universe (2023). Dark matter is known, or felt to occur, through observations undertaken by astronomer Vera Rubin (and her team) in the 1970s. Rubin’s investigation measured and revealed how the rotational velocities of stars retained a constant velocity, despite their distance. This therefore prevents stars from flying off into the galaxy, a phenomenon explained thanks to an unseen mass that held them there (Randall 2015: 33). Therefore, dark matter is felt (in physics-related terms) via what it makes occur, how it influences its surroundings or through traces of what it makes happen. Dark matter is given its name, despite the lack of clarity for what it is, due to its inability to emit or absorb light. Technically speaking, transparent matter might be a better fit. In the talk Cerdeño contextualizes and situates dark matter in the mundane. He gives details of the amount of this elusive substance held in a 500 ml bottle of water (approximately one particle) and the amount of dark matter surrounding us in the seminar room. Indeed, as Randall asserts, ‘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: 20). Dark matter, despite being in abundance all around us, defies direct experience; we cannot get a feel for particle physics. In this, I follow Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, who ask, ‘What if we reinitiate the problem of physics as a problem of feel?’ stating, ‘There’s a reason why the Newton under the apple tree story is so compelling. It links physical law with experience’ (2016: 31). My attempts to listen in or get a feel for dark matter build on Jeffrey T. Nealon’s argument for performativity as a force that ‘methodologically … is not a question of resolving issues and tidying things up … but of working with and through the dynamism of any given situation’ (2021: 37).

In September 2022, at the annual Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) conference on the University of Essex campus, I tell a senior lecturer in live art, whose work focuses on the performance and representation of illness and disability, how I am investigating dark matter and research processes among physicists. I casually explain how billions of dark matter particles are passing through us every second. They immediately leap to their feet to physically shake off any particles of dark matter that might be attached to them. Later, I also tell a performance artist who focuses on contemporary participatory performance and awkwardness. From the middle of the campus car park, they shout back at me to verify whether we are shedding atoms as we speak and whether I have any proof for links between dark matter and anxiety. ‘It’s scientifically unconfirmed, but there are no guarantees!’ I say.

Dark matter, as part of our mundane existence, like Maurice Blanchot’s account of everyday experience, cannot be classified or, as Michael Sheringham notes, ‘objectified historically [or] commodified into narratable events’ (2006: 9). Sheringham, reading Blanchot’s Everyday Speech (1987), notes how ‘the experience of the everyday cannot be reduced to its content … because it consists in perpetual becoming’ (2006: 16). He asserts it is this ‘mobile indeterminacy and openness, that gives the quotidian its radical character’ (ibid.). This is where Blanchot, Sheringham notes, departs from Henri Lefebvre, as Blanchot’s use of the everyday does not evidence alienation but underscores how indeterminacy provides an ‘energizing capacity to subvert intellectual and institutional authority’ (17). A turn towards the mundane aspects of dark matter as ordinary substance, rather than scientific spectacle, I argue, can offer a source of dissident political energy.

From a physics-based perspective there are a number of specific procedures and processes required to access the elusive particles surrounding us. The mundane, in terms of particle searches, demands specific detection equipment and conditions devoid of noise from known phenomena, such as cosmic rays, to become an objective scientific study. The search for the extraordinary within our ordinary everyday lives is, perhaps inevitably, bound up in the logistics of material transportation, calculations, and banal procedures to ensure the purity of data, to avoid unwanted interference. I believe it is the very resistance of the mundane to form, or ongoing amorphous character of dark matter that haunts the efforts of physicists in their ongoing searches for this elusive substance. Let’s imagine the minute particle harbours an anarchic ever-changing energy resistant to category or categorization.

FIRST FIELD TRIP: KNOWING WHAT IS NOT

In April 2022, I visit the Laboratory for the Acoustic Detection of Astroparticles based at the Gandía campus of Polytechnic University of Valencia. I’ve overheard that, since 2008, deep within the Mediterranean Sea, a dark matter detection experiment has been listening in to collisions between high-energy particles. The apparatus sits at a depth of 2,450 metres some 40 kilometres off the coast from Toulon in France. The experiment not only listens via hydrophones and piezoceramic sensors, but also detects, via optical modules known as photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), the brilliant blue light (Cherenkov radiation) emitted when particles collide. The experiment ANTARES (Astronomy with a Neutrino Telescope and Abyss environmental RESearch) consists of twelve vertical lines (detection units) each 450 metres long suspended by buoys and anchored by beacons in an area protected from maritime traffic. On each line sits a number of the aforementioned optical modules (a total of 885), a technology sensitive to emissions produced when particles meet. A series of cables connect each apparatus to a hub housing the data. Upon arrival at the university campus the first thing I learn when I meet Miquel Ardid and his research group is that in February 2022, the experiment, having been in operation for sixteen years, had ceased taking data.

In May 2022 I hear this again as physicist Rebecca Gozzini delivers a presentation on the topic at MultiDark, a Spanish-based research network and regular conference to share research methodologies for the identification of dark matter. She shows a video clip of the decommissioning process (2022). Optical modules covered in seaweed and fish excrement are dredged up from the depths using nautical equipment. The mundane lives of fish tangled up with scientific equipment. There is a palpable sense of sadness in the room as we watch the footage. A collective sigh circulates as she confirms that, to date, they are no further along in uncovering what the elusive particle is. While the full data set was still, at that time, undergoing analysis, the search for dark matter remains unsuccessful. The sense of sadness is quite quickly replaced by enthusiasm for the next generation neutrino telescope KM3NeT, a larger more sensitive version of ANTARES. Later that evening over dinner one of the senior physicists proposes a toast to being closer to knowing what dark matter is not.

A large percentage of the consistency of the universe we inhabit is unknown. This is an opportunity for imagining otherwise. Sylvia Wynter notes that the majority of our society’s structures are ‘made to appear, in common-sense terms, as being naturally determined … as the only possible realization of the way the world must be and “is”’ (cited in McKittrick 2015: 11, emphasis in original). Positive resistance to rigid structures and fixed thinking can be practised if we attend to the aforementioned percentage of unknown mundane matter present in our daily lives. We should take collective strength from this and, building on Spivak’s aforementioned notion of the planet ‘belonging to another system’, ready ourselves to suspend imposed structures. In doing so we can break with aspects of certainty and stability that do not serve the common good. A constant questioning of what is imposed and invented for the regimes of what Wynter describes as ‘consumption-andaccumulation’ (McKittrick 2015: 11) is required. I believe a greater public focus on the frustrations and slow procedures of scientific advancement can offer resistance. This shifts and debunks the myths of certainty and stability that science, since the Enlightenment period purports to bring.

SECOND FIELD TRIP: THE MUNDANE AS OBSTACLE TO THE UNKNOWN

In July 2022, I visit the Canfranc Underground Laboratory in the Spanish Pyrenees located 800 metres beneath Mount Tobazo. Here, I am surrounded by cosmic silence due to the volume of rock that impedes the penetration of cosmic rays and other unwanted interferences. I learn about the use of liquid argon in dark matter detectors. Ultimately, they require the procurement of radio pure underground argon. This, I find out, is commercially available from a natural gas drilling site named Urania (after the Greek muse of astronomy) in southwest Colorado, USA. Technically it is a by-product in the production of natural gas by Kinder Morgan, the Houston-based pipeline and drilling company who manage the site. The extraction and storage of liquid argon is a lengthy logistical process. It relies on carefully parameterized transportation to ensure its radio purity is left intact. For this reason, rather than using aeroplanes, a long, complicated sequence involving trucks, laytime at ports and container ships is necessary. Before I reach the lab, I meet physicist Susana Cebrián at the Center for Astroparticles and High Energy Physics at the University of Zaragoza. She shares her careful calculations to ensure the pure state of the gas. A detailed diagram on a presentation slide evidences how the maximum quantity to be drawn from Urania is 330 kilograms per day, which is equal to 90 tonnes per year (2022). Once loaded onto trucks in high-pressure cylinders it is transported via boat to Aria, a 350-metrestall cryogenic distillation tower located in a refurbished carbon mineshaft in Sardinia, Italy, where the liquid argon undergoes a purification phase. Here the liquid argon is chemically purified to ensure no alteration in its original state and to verify it reaches the required grade for use in the destined dark matter detector. The final stage involves the transportation of the liquid argon overland to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy where it is inserted into DarkSide-20k, an experiment set to be in operation for a decade from 2025 onwards. The whole process can take up to two years and, at the time of writing, is yet to begin.

At the Canfranc Underground Laboratory I interview Vicente Pesudo, the technical coordinator on the project. He states that argon 40 is ‘the boring guy’ yet it is the one ‘we like’ as it induces fewer problems (Collins 2022). This is opposed to argon 39 that has been subjected to bombardment from cosmic rays since the formation of Earth. The cosmic interference decays over time but is considered to be background noise, clouding readings from the detector. Argon 40 is radio pure, Vicente assures me, meaning the readings from the detector have a much higher sensitivity to what we are yet to know about the universe. Other experiments, I find out, while undertaking fieldwork at the Canfranc Underground Laboratory, made use of ancient Roman-era lead uncovered at shipwrecks on the bottom of the ocean as cladding to protect dark matter experiments from interference. Similar to argon, the old lead has a higher purity rating and is less radioactive than newer commercial samples.

The mundane that forms and informs the background to our lives is increasingly difficult to access, not only in descriptive terms yet also scientific terms. Alarmingly, in the case of dark matter detection, it would seem we are running short of materials pure enough to use, largely due to pollution from the Industrial Revolution and other atmospheric impurities in circulation. Perhaps, if we think of the mundane as a liminal space of experience, it can only be accessed through unreflecting, inexact forms of participation. The minute we try to measure, it eludes us. This indeterminate relation reinstates the status of the mundane as harnessing what Blanchot (1987), in relation to the everyday, describes as dissolving power, an energetic capacity to resist category, disciplinarity or intellectual authority.

This stance aligns well with performance studies, which, as Cervera states, is an ‘openly activist (anti-) discipline)’ (2017). Discipline, as Katherine McKittrick remarks, is a form of colonialism, a form of practising empire. Ultimately, ‘discipline is the act of relentless categorization’ (2021: 45) governed by financial logics and thinking embroiled with positivistic thrust and, as McKittrick states:

Disciplines are coded and presented as disconnected from experiential knowledge … Disciplines stack and bifurcate seemingly disconnected categories and geographies; disciplines differentiate, split and create fictive distances between us. (McKittrick 2021: 36)

If we insist on trying to get a feel for particle physics, however subjective or experiential, we uncover a means to move outside of reason.

Due to the clear experimental conditions under which one must perform dark matter detection searches certain rules cannot be broken. However, I am keen to push the role of the imagination, by listening in to the mundane and to that which is without category, experimenting with the ability to stretch our senses to, at least performatively, get a feel for the elusive matter all around us. As Elena Loizidiou, in reference to Reiner Schürmann states, ‘by sticking with the premise that reason is the foundation of everything, we obstruct anything new from emerging into the world’ (2023: 3, emphasis in original). Returning to Heckert’s position, as outlined in the introduction, it is the act of listening that remains crucial to a politics of indeterminacy and to anarchism. Listening opens up ‘a broader perception of what is and a wider imagination of what is possible’ (2010: 199). By listening we feel our way in our societal relations, moving away from hierarchical and imposed arrangements.

A SENSORIAL SLANT ON THE MUNDANE

I listen in to an MA-level seminar presentation on the ‘Historical Motivation for Dark Matter’, and, as the lecturer, David Cerdeño, speaks, distinct worlds – nonhuman and human – are conjured (2022). Poetic phrases such as ‘old stars’ are inserted into explanations as though empty of poetry. I note how language, in this context, serves as a means to evoke an analysis then move into mathematical equations. As I listen, I think about the words of Dimitris Papadopoulos who asks, ‘What if we approach social movement action not as targeting existing political power but as experimenting with worlds?’ (2018: 3). The worlds conjured by those in the seminar room are rational, calculable, as objective notions held in common, such as the mass of the Sun and the observation of galaxy rotational curves, are exchanged and confirmed.

Later in the year I lead and deliver a seminar for ‘Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning’, a study group of artists, architects and cultural workers curated by Isabel de Naverán for the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid⁶. Over the course of the first hour, I intersperse my field notes, a new audio composition (in collaboration with Adam Matschulat) with bibliographic findings from my ongoing research project. I share examples of vibratory modernism in the works of Umberto Boccioni’s Mater (also known as Materia) (1912) and Francišek Kupka’s Amorpha: Fugue in two colours (1912) from the early twentieth-century obsession with notions of the ether. The ether, now a scientifically disproved construct, alluded to the electromagnetic waves surrounding us. I also share notes on the attempts of theosophist Madame Helena Blavatsky to evidence, via performances, the transformative potential of matter and energy. I find Blavatsky’s penchant for the domestic space over the laboratory and her insistence on the insertion of subjectivity over scientific objectivity compelling. I include references to radical experimental British writer Christine Brooke-Rose who used lecture notes from public talks on astroparticle physics to write her novel Such (1966). The novel is about indeterminacy and boldly evidences the author’s interest in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The references stack up in the seminar room, the layers of audio build too. I end with a blank slide and turn out the small lamplight I had brought to alter the alienating atmosphere caused by the fluorescent tubes. The audience sits in silence. Later, Isabel comments how artist researchers and indeed artists, in the best of cases, are making worlds through their careful choice of language, phrasing and the placing of form and content.

For the final exercise of the seminar, I take the group to the restricted access computer cluster, having obtained permission from senior management a priori. In this medium-sized room in the basement of the Institute for Theoretical Physics a large quantity of computers run numerical simulations for the detection of dark matter. The noise from cooling fans is noticeable and a strange cosmic wind can be felt. The group undertakes deep listening exercises, inspired by Pauline Oliveros, as each person attempts to stretch an ear to the unknown within the mundane (fig. 1). All return fundamentally changed as though they had had a profound sensorial experience. The group of dark matter theorists, who I had asked to join us for a mutual exchange on research processes, are gobsmacked by the reaction of the artists to what for them is a tool for their mundane investigations. A few days later, I report back to the director of the institute, who struggles to understand why anyone would care to linger in the uncomfortable computer cluster room. For them it is a tool, often full of frustrations, for advancing research. It has use-value, rather than poetic potential. I’m reminded of Sara Ahmed’s recent work on use and misuse, who suggests, ‘A phenomenology of usefulness would attend to how use involves a way of arranging worlds as well as ourselves’ (2019: 26). I consider how attuning to the elusive unknown energies of dark matter might require a rearrangement of our sensorial apparatus to enable us to become more sensitive to the mundane milieu we are in. An attentive occupation of the present and its energies (both human and non-human) as a practice of positive resistance to stay with the mundane. To access the latent poetics inherent in the scientific mundane it might be worth holding onto, as Ahmed states, both ‘the magical and the mundane’ with their potential to be both ‘plodding and capacious at the same time’ (6). Equally, in the work of Brooke-Rose I find some crucial reflections, via the work of Julia Jordan, on the conception of energy that operates ‘both as emotional and thermodynamic’ (2018: 275). Human and non-human energy must be considered a resource that can waste itself, should be organized and, above all, listened to.

In June 2023, I find myself on a sun lounger next to an infinity pool overlooking the Sardinero Beach in Santander, Cantabria. I’m here for the Dark Matter 2023 conference. As I recline, I overhear the presentations. Words waft from an open window in the conference suite. As I listen my listening gets reflected and refracted in the ripples of water. The bodies of holiday-makers, who share the hotel facilities alongside conference-goers, float and swim on the crest of a series of microscopic waves. I catch my thoughts as they echo all around forming a list, or mantra of sorts:

1. The mundane is relational. Dark matter surrounds our mundane lives indifferent to differences imposed by Western logics.

2. The ethics of relations can be thought of as anarchistic, operating outside of and in spite of imposed hierarchies.

3. Attuning to indeterminacy and attending to the mundane we get a feel for the unknown. This sits uneasily alongside global logics, and should be collectively practiced for positive resistance.

Figure 1. Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning. Alberto García Aznar listening to numerical simulations for dark matter detection at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Madrid. Photo Rebecca Collins, courtesy of the author

Notes

1 Funded by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Saltire Early Career Fellowship (2022–3), grant no. 1897.

2 A neutrino observatory, the first detector of its kind, is situated at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. Thousands of spherical optical sensors sit underneath the ice, at depths from 1.45 metres to 2.45 metres below the surface, searching for almost massless subatomic particles

3 For Stolen Voices (2014–21) eavesdropping is both subject and methodology of the research. Fieldwork in the form of site explorations and the practice of eavesdropping is combined with research into social, political and economic dynamics at the borders and margins of the UK. See Collins and Linsley (forthcoming)

4 Causality is traditionally understood as cause and effect. Karen Barad, drawing on the work of Niels Bohr and Judith Butler, rethinks this conventional binary view in her theory of ‘intra-action’ whereby human and non-human entities exist in entangled, complex ecologies (2007).

5 While gravitational evidence for Dark Matter dates back to early astrophysical and cosmological observations, its particle nature is yet to be proven. The history of dark matter detection techniques is still being written.

6 The ‘Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning’ study group is linked to the research project ‘The New Loss of Centre. Critical practices of live arts and architecture in the Anthropocene’, directed by Fernando Quesada. PID2019-105045GB-100.