The Great Refractor
2024, 4k video and multichannel sound, 38 minutes
The Great Refractor, a collaboration with Irish poet and neuroscientist Laurence O’Dwyer, charts the undulating terrain of our attempts to understand the world through both scientific and poetic inquiries. The film contrasts histories of mapping, visualizing and territorializing with contemporary practices centered on sounding, listening and collective resonation. The film presents a series of solitary figures engaged in their work: each person, whether an astrophysicist, an artist, a translator or a weather station engineer, is engrossed in their unique process of observation and exploration. Participants were asked to mimic with their voices the sounds of their own sonified observations, from underwater hydrophone recordings to black hole gravitation waves. All the sound in the video was made from these vocal recordings. As the work progresses, the participants vocalizations reach beyond language to become a collective music of utterances, noises and breath.
This probing by sonic means approaches the logic of diffraction, theorized by physicist Karen Barad as the physical basis for “difference that makes a difference,” with the emphasis on energies that activate within a relation. Performing the Heisenbergian uncertainty of acknowledging your interaction with what you are attempting to observe, the act of sounding departs from the gathering of optical information.
Rather than the idea of echoes “capturing” an image of something out there, sounding finds entities via echoes and sympathetic vibration. It substitutes what Barad calls intra-action, a diffractive logic of interference through slits and openings that produce knowledge but also introduce a new reality of propagating waves that take a new shape because of our observing them. The newly diffracted form is nonetheless revealing and true of the relation between the sounding and sounded bodies. To stay with the sonic, we might call this diffractive way of engaging by sounding attunement, which adds to the metaphor of diffracted waves the fact of sympathetic vibration.
— Caroline A. Jones, Science New Wave festival