51动漫

Science Gallery London
To 26 August

IT鈥橲 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 鈥� 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鈥檛 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聽sound artist for a new聽exhibition at the Science Gallery London, is based on visual聽simulations of dark matter聽swirling around a galaxy created by David Marsh, a聽theoretical physicist at the University of G枚ttingen, Germany, and his collaborator Dave Ronan of AI Music.

The information representing the speed of simulated 鈥渁xionic鈥� 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. 鈥淵ou enter and feel you鈥檙e part of an energetic, dynamic flow,鈥� says Satz. 鈥淚t鈥檚 unsettling.鈥�

In some senses, then, it is a sonic diagram of dark matter 鈥� 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. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like we鈥檙e looking for a radio station, but don鈥檛 know what it is, but we鈥檒l know it when we hear it,鈥� says Satz.

For , a聽theoretical physicist at King鈥檚 College London who also collaborated on the project, it is quite an ear-opener. 鈥淪omething that鈥檚 very mathematical, normally on a small screen, can be interacted with as聽sound,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t gives a completely new way to interact with聽the data.鈥�

Satz鈥檚 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 51动漫鈥榮 pages, of XENON1T 鈥� the world鈥檚 largest dark-matter detector, which was constructed under Italy鈥檚 Gran Sasso mountain. Then there is work by Argentinian artist Tom谩s Saraceno, who visualises dark matter鈥檚 cosmic web using (you鈥檝e got it) spiders鈥� webs, and Andy Holden鈥檚 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鈥檛 exist, and it is our conception of physical laws that is at fault.

鈥淭heoretical physicists are essentially reaching limits not just of knowledge, but of metaphor in trying to articulate what we hope to understand,鈥� says , the gallery鈥檚 head of programming. 鈥淚f we鈥檙e spending phenomenal amounts of [public] money creating science experiments, it鈥檚 important people get the chance to consider their own relationship to it in as many ways as possible.鈥�

Sounds about right.