A Return to Matter and Affect: Bodily Perception in Sensing Dark Matter

Chih-Yung CHIU, Professor at the Graduate Institute of Art and Technology and Associate Dean of the College of Arts, National Tsing Hua University 

"In an underground laboratory, in a self-isolating atmosphere, we attempt to connect to this invisible—yet real—matter, inviting the body to experience sensations beyond our senses."

-- Su Wen-Chi, Sensing Dark Matter

Following her fascination with gravity during an artistic residency at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and her exploration of dark matter at the University of Melbourne's Dark Matter Centre, Su Wen-chi appears to have embarked on an ongoing inquiry into what lies beyond human senses, grounded in the philosophy of new materialism. The inquiry echoes Quentin Meillassoux's speculative realism, through which the philosopher speculates on "an absolute" – a reality independent of thoughts, humans, human thoughts, and any kind of giving. It exists freely, but humans can speculate about it, contemplating what breaks away from human thinking¹.

Like a phantom, dark matter is invisible, untouchable and scentless, yet it penetrates our bodies constantly. It resembles a "quasi-object" in how it possesses autonomous agency but waits for human construction. Through artistic creativity, Su Wen-Chi and her team translate inexpressible frontier science into a visual expression integrating choreography, sound, and scientific imagery. The interdisciplinary project thus offers viewers a temporary escape from the cold and abstruse knowledge of science, allowing them to freely feel the warm touch of technological art as their bodies are immersed in a realm of aesthetic affect. Sensing Dark Matter further invites viewers to explore a speculative universe, where dark matter and its gravity become perceivable.

In the laboratory, dark matter's self-evident detachment from humans and its consequent independent existence demonstrate its accidental and even lonely nature. However, Su's Sensing Dark Matter presents a new intersubjective and interlinked relationship between dark matter and humans, where a sensory or intentional object encounters another and their relationship flashes forth. Her work employs point cloud technology to transform a massive chandelier-like scientific device into a spatial situation within a virtual reality interface, bringing people into a realm of art as well as science where they can explore and speculate about dark matter with their bodies. Sensing Dark Matter encourages viewers to reimagine the scientific principles underlying the universe, allowing for a close encounter with dark matter – the most mysterious reality of the universe – and enabling them to feel their connection to the hidden structure of the universe.

¹Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 49.

A return to the new materialist perspective on the "material turn" may help illuminate Su's artistic attempt in Sensing Dark Matter. Its exploration through invisible dark matter effectively challenges anthropocentric dichotomies (including the division between nature and culture, object and subject, humans and things, or meaning and thing). In the digital age, human knowledge of natural science depends significantly on technology and is artistically translated into something poetic. Furthermore, Sensing Dark Matter reconceptualises what defines the materiality of "matter" – it no longer considers matter to possess or be reducible to a fixed "entity," but rather sees it as a process. The process of materialisation produces the ontological state of matter and signifies that matter possesses certain capacities.

In fact, the affect of a subject (body) arises precisely from the interlinked dynamics within relationships. Gilles Deleuze argues that it is the feelings and encounters in emotional flux that constitute the state of the body. Affect is as spiritual as it is physical, whilst it is also the force of existence combining both or the continuous becoming of puissance². In Sensing Dark Matter, Su uses the virtual reality interface to create an intimate relationship with the abstract reality of dark matter, placing both viewers and dark matter into unique assemblages and bestowing an artistic substance and state upon the latter. The assemblages are presented as immersive experiences which lead to actions and events. Eventually, affect emerges and begins to transform.

In Sensing Dark Matter, Su establishes an interlinked relationship between the universe and the embodied mind. As viewers experience and perceive the realm of dark matter (with their bodily senses taking in the various signs from the external environment), the cognitive subject may transmit the external signs and translate them into internal signs and intentionality. This in turn generates affect and reaction. In other words, viewers' affect toward the universe of dark matter is a result of how Su transforms the form of such abstract matter and makes it possible for it to emerge from the interrelations of perceptual experiences.

²Minan Wang, Affect, Affect, Materiality, and Contemporaneity (Jinan: Shandong People’s Publishing House, 2022), p. 7.