15 June 2019 | New Scientist | 31Show
Dark Matter
Science Gallery London
To 26 August
IT’S a discombobulating 11 minutes
in a lock-up garage in a hip part
of east London. The pulsating
soundscape issuing from
10 speakers encircling me is by
turns oddly menacing and strangely
thrilling, ebbing and flowing with
low throbs and high harmonics.
It is kind of cosmic – appropriately
enough, since this is what dark
matter sounds like. Or at least it is
what dark matter might sound like
if we had the faintest idea what it
looked like, which we don’t really.
The nature of this matter, which
prevailing ideas of gravity suggest
makes up over 80 per cent of all
the stuff in the universe, remains
fundamentally opaque.
The installation, the brainchild
of sound artist Aura Satz for a
new exhibition at the Science
Gallery London, is based on
visual simulations of dark
matter swirling around a galaxy
created by Malcolm Fairbairn,
a theoretical physicist at King’s
College London.
The information representing
the speed of simulated “axionic”
dark matter is usually rendered
as pixels on a screen. But why
make visual something so clearly
unenvisagable? Instead, Satz took
the data from 10 points in a circle
a few kiloparsecs in diameter in
the simulated galaxy to feed her
speakers, carefully calibrating
frequencies to create the kind of
psychoacoustic effects guaranteed
to mess with our minds. “You
enter and feel you’re part of an
Noises in the dark
Dark matter may have physicists stumped, but a new exhibition has other
ways of illuminating the elusive stuff, finds Richard Webbenergetic, dynamic flow,” says Satz.
“It’s unsettling.”
In some senses, then, it is a sonic
diagram of dark matter – but in the
way the constant flow of sound
never quite resolves into anything,
it is also a metaphor for the
frustrating hunt for the stuff. “It’s
like we’re looking for a radio station,
but don’t know what it is, but we’ll
know it when we hear it,” says Satz.
For Fairbairn, it is quite an
ear-opener. “Something that’s very
mathematical, normally on a small
screen, can be interacted with
as sound,” he says. “It gives a
completely new way to interact
with the data.”
Satz’s installation is one of
15 works by 13 artists in the
Science Gallery exhibition that aim
to interrogate the mystery of dark
matter in different ways. They
include photography by Enrico
Sacchetti, often featured on New
Scientist’s pages, of XENON1T – the
world’s largest dark-matter detector,
which was constructed under Italy’sGran Sasso mountain. Then there
is work by Argentinian artist
Tomás Saraceno, who visualises
dark matter’s cosmic web using
(you’ve got it) spiders’ webs, and
Andy Holden’s immersive cartoon
environment that defies the normal
laws of gravity.
That last work represents
a different way out of the
dark-matter conundrum: that
the stuff simply doesn’t exist,
and it is our conception of physical
laws that is at fault.
“Theoretical physicists are
essentially reaching limits
not just of knowledge, but of
metaphor in trying to articulate
what we hope to understand,”
says John O’Shea, the gallery’s
head of programming. “If we’re
spending phenomenal amounts
of [public] money creating science
experiments, it’s important people
get the chance to consider their
own relationship to it in as many
ways as possible.”
Sounds about right. ❚Defying gravity: Andy
Holden’s immersive
cartoon environments AN
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