Micro-Documentary: Collective Practices of Uncertainty
Collective Practices of Uncertainty is a micro-documentary that shares findings from the workshop Dark Matter Detectives: Listening in on the first few minutes of the Universe.
The workshop, following an open call, offered an opportunity for artists, experimental composers, and particle physicists to foster intellectual companionship, share performative tactics, and uncover the poetics and emotional forces found in the tiniest (and invisible) components of our Universe.
Research-based inquiries, field explorations, collaborative tasks, deep listening, and compositional prompts engaged the selected participants in a series of creative acts to disrupt disciplined ways of knowing.
The mystery of the origins of our Universe formed the focus of this encounter and we collectively probed the perceptive, philosophical, ontological, and epistemological challenges that this unresolved conundrum proposed.
The experimental and interdisciplinary approach intentionally juxtaposed forms of thinking, describing, and making which rarely touch though that might, through collectively practising and embodying uncertainty, find new imaginative forms for understanding the dynamic interplay between the microscopic and macroscopic, the known unknowns and unknown knowns of the universe we inhabit.
Three core questions framed and informed the curation of the event:
- What kind of creative or qualitative accounts can we make for that which we can detect yet we cannot see, or otherwise sense?
- If we cannot know in determinate ways, how can we make something known through what it makes happen?
- What are the tips and tactics for the cultivation of an anti-everyday intuition?
The three-day workshop was curated and led by Rebecca Collins with assistance from the Uncertain Team a.k.a Idoia Zabaleta, Miguel Álvarez-Fernández and David G. Cerdeño. The workshop took place at AZALA in Lasierra, a centre for advanced creative practice, between 18 – 21 July 2022.