Slow Light Shadow Matter

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Slow Light Shadow Matter is a long-term project comprising 13 short digitally created animated videos: twelve chapters and a prologue. It is typically presented on three screens. The title itself refers to two concepts from physics. In 1999 scientists “used a new state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate … to bring light down to the speed of a bicycle and then later to a dead halt.” This is called slow light. Shadow matter refers to a hypothetical material “that interacts with ordinary matter, only by gravity, which means hardly at all.” The imagery in SLSM consists of densely montaged computer generated animated imagery, text, music and voice. Each chapter is inspired by an artist and a scientist who were approximate contemporaries. The chapters are held together by multiple themes including the physics and history of light, electromagnetism and quantum physics, world mythologies, alchemy, and biology. As the focus of each chapter depends on different scientists and artists the aesthetic of each too changes. The same elements reappear in each chapter in different perspectives and styles. Think of how jazz musicians reimagine identical songs in starkly variable ways. In fact the voiceover of these videos recounts a biography closely based on jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman. In addition, the musical soundtrack has been created by internationally known free-improv composer and musician Thollem.

The scientists are almost all physicists who have worked with some aspect of electromagnetic or quantum theory. There are three dissimilar scientists who represent a sub-theme of biology. The work of the artists usually relate to light and/or color. Here too divergent members are included in order to develop other ideas. The connections that are drawn between these historical figures are entirely aesthetic and intuitive.

The scientist/artist pairs are listed here (completed chapters can be seen by clicking titles below):

Prologue (El Greco)

Isaac Newton/Jan Vermeer
Michael Faraday/William Turner
James Clerk Maxwell/Claude Monet

Rosalind Franklin/Richard Long

Ernest Rutherford/Paul Cezanne
Niels Bohr/Wassily Kandinsky
David Bohm/Richard Pousette-Dart

Albert Hofmann/Pierre Soulages

John S. Bell/Jasper Johns
John Archibald Wheeler/Agnes Martin
Murray Gell-Mann/Sol Lewitt

James Lovelock/Ana Mendieta

Learn more about the artist, Dennis Summers, here.