If you gasp out loud at the BOM BOM BOM BOM of Richard Strauss’ ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ booming over Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, have you ever wondered what it would sound like if that flabbergasting film’s spiralling starscapes spoke back? If they could create music from the very building blocks of reality?
The marks are, in turn, read by an electronic program based on open-source software design by Colombian-German code artist Olivia Jack and played back by what sounds a bit like a theremin, emitting a ghostly chorus of blippity blop space music. It wouldn’t sound out of place in Doctor Who. ‘I feel like a trespasser in science, but I’m using that term lightly, because scientists are also very welcoming,’ Butt says of the collaborative nature of Science Gallery Melbourne and its Dark Matters partners Arts at CERN and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics. These institutions have embraced the endless possibility of artists sharing space with scientists in laboratories, inspiring each other to go further.
