Dark Matters: An Eidolic Collision of Sound and Vision

To the extent that scientific data are repeatable, verifiable, and falsifiable, we might follow McLuhan in saying that they are staged in visual space.1 In chapter 1’s analysis of Dyens’s cultural bodies, then, it is specifically the vision of scientific representation—which is virtually synonymous with replication, for Dyens—that is challenged from two sides simultaneously: on one hand, it is haunted by forces that are qualitatively different than those that it registers; on the other hand, its very representations, pushed to the extreme, turn back on themselves to speak against the terms that conditioned them in the first place. In a sense, these two lines of encounter subtend one another, the former taking place as that which is present but invisible to empiricism—what I will call its sound—and the latter as that which empiricism creates but cannot avow as a creation.

If scientific technological posthumanism (of the type emblematized by Dyens) is situated in visual space, then, it is not difficult to understand how it might be haunted by sound: like Serres’s parasite, sound plays the position, while science—conceived and constrained by visual objectivity—tends to play the contents.2 In this sense, every sound is a ghost, which is why we are always looking for the sources of sounds, trying to place and identify them: we hunt down hauntings and flush them out, only to always hear more. Indeed, when all is quiet and calm, we still hear blood circulate through our veins with a gentle chatter and thump that suggests that we ourselves are ghosts: to be alive in an age of cultural bodies is to be haunted, be it by genes, memes, or any other strata of reproductive otherness.

However, how might we think the other intensity of scientific technological posthumanism, that which is registered visually, created in visual space, and yet—in the very fact of its being created—speaks to a force that is invisible? In fact, scientific discourse has already nominated this phenomenon—or rather, this nonphenomenon—as “dark matter,” marking an undetectable hypothetical substance that structures the entire universe. Eluding the ubiquitous pull of electromagnetic force, dark matter is visible only through its invisibility, through its gravitational pull on visibility itself. Darkness, it seems, is what we are really perceiving when we see the spectacular explosions of charged atoms that constitutes, equally, the atrocities of Guantanamo and the click of a mouse, the underground activity of the Large Hadron Collider and its full spectrum realization in the language of digital media. History itself, dark matter would suggest, can only be a phantasmatic relation to the real gravitational pull of darkness.

Following the lineaments of these two related but distinct metaphors—ghosts and dark matter—this chapter probes the exhibition Eidola, which unfolds an encounter between disciplinary biases of sonic and visual art practices that accentuates how both are infused with a part of the other that they simply cannot make sense of.3 To this end, the exhibit premiered works by two artists: False Ruminations by William Brent, a sound artist and computer programmer whose works are regularly realized by robots that possess a striking visual presence, and Basement Suite by Ellen Moffat, a visual artist whose installations employ sound environmentally, compositionally, and as a catalyst for audience immersion. In this chapter, then, I will argue that Eidola operates in and as an incommensurability of sound and vision, which the exhibit works against one another in a riot of recombinant and reiterative hauntings and forces. In this reading, sound intervenes as a dual identity, on one hand whispering its otherness to vision, while on the other hand suggesting that this otherness is dominantly interior to vision as the “paradoxical identity of both sides of the distinction.”4 In this way, sound—like dark matter—is a blind spot of visual observation but as such operates equally to trouble both terms in the relation as it does to assert the relation itself. Dark visions become haunting sounds and haunted sounds are darkly visible, then, with each flip contributing to a collective insistence on a collision of sound and vision that, with Eidola, spawns the question: in hearing (rather than seeing) dark matter, might it be perceived not as a structuring principle but rather as a kind of sonic delirium?

Entering the gallery for the opening of Eidola, your vision circulates in series between three locations: upward to Brent’s “Ludbots,” sixteen inverted percussion mallets housed in industrial sheet metal bases and suspended from the gallery ceiling in a disciplined stillness, all glaring at the lengths of wood that hang inches from their heads; across to the deepest corner, where the skeleton of a horizontal surface floats above the gallery floor, a single bottom-mounted ethereal light acting as an arterial link between the network of widely spaced floor panels; and finally, around the room, in search of familiar faces, social cues, or simply a place to stand. Each of these three figures draws only a moment’s attention before your eye moves on to the next or back to the previous; the order of movement is unpredictable but relentless and motivated.

Supplementing this vision, though, is the sonic component of Eidola, which is, in a sense, perfectly wrong for an art opening setting: in Basement Suite, the slow and quiet revelation of the everyday melody of a house creaking, furniture dragging, and children scampering—all projected through small speakers mounted to the bottom of the suspended panels—is lost amid the throng of conversation and the squeaks and groans of the gallery; conversely, False Ruminations alternates between sitting in quiet stillness and bursting out in exuberant four-minute attacks of mallets on wood, the latter aggressively interrupting the social gathering of the opening to insist on themselves. The patterns that emerge from this insistence, though, are not supported by the accoutrements of the space: the rituals and spacing for conventional listening are simply not available so that the would-be sonic phrases operate instead rhetorically, as belligerent interjections, rather than as a site of attention in their own right. Collectively, then, the sound of the installation is at best inappropriate for the setting of the opening, being alternately inaudibly soft and inconveniently loud.

In this first encounter with Eidola, then, two ghosts emerge, each paradoxical in nature. In False Ruminations, the sound is clearly audible but is rendered visually: the literal sound is alternately present and absent and functions unambiguously and autonomously. This clear figuration, though, disinvests the work of its sound per se—of its sonic mediality—in the sense that these interruptions are (at the exhibit’s opening) haunted by the absence of any specifically sonic relation. That is, if we are thinking of sound as a kind of dark matter, the fact that False Ruminations’s sounds are identifiable obscures the darkness—the unvisibility—of its material. Put differently, False Ruminations makes the “sound-ness” of its sounds disappear in full aural view, their sonic specificity sublimated to their registration as both the sound of the Ludbots and the presence of Brent’s piece (which did not, prior to the Ludbots’ activation, otherwise separate itself from the collective exhibition). That is, these interjections are medially underdetermined: they operate functionally, and their function is one that could be performed without, necessarily, any sound at all. In other words, their sound is put into discourse.

By contrast, Basement Suite works in the opposite manner. The time between False Ruminations’s eruptions—each interval lasting as long as eight minutes—would, in theory, be the time during which the comparatively soft sounds of Basement Suite are exposed. However, the opening’s large attendance renders the sounds from the Suite indiscernible from those of the gathering: the piece is by no means silent, but it is also not identifiable. And yet there is always the sense that the clusters of people are grouped in specific formations, that their social chatter falls subtly in rhythm with the phrasing of Moffat’s environment; indeed, the composition of Basement Suite consists in recordings made with microphones attached to the underside of her home’s floorboards, above which social gatherings much like the opening took place during recording. The point, then, is that Basement Suite’s sounds are practically inaudible, but as a result, in hearing them, we lose ourselves to their ghostly sonic physics.

The conversation at the opening, the social gathering, is thus ghosted in its own right, haunted both by a present absence (the flight of medial specificity from False Ruminations’s sounds) and an absent presence (the social organizing effect that Basement Suite has on the attendees). These first ghosts of Eidola, then, are the twin movements of sound from and into perception, each instituting a degree of disjunction into the opening that is congruent with the overall thematic play of Eidola: the title of the exhibition, after all, was chosen for its double etymology, tracing its lineage to a Greek word that means both “ghost” and “bias.” Between these three scenes that first catch one’s eye on entering, then, a cross-pollination occurs as sounds emerge through object and social presences. And yet the reverse is also true, in that objects and conversation emerge as the material detritus of sound. Sounds are channeled into spatial dialogue, ghosts sing with ghosts through bodies of wire and wood: an interdisciplinarity of new media practice, realized through practices of disciplinary ghosting. Eidola asks, in other words, what happens when sounds take visual presence? No longer dematerialized—no longer simply auditory—sounds are here seen as well. Such is the demand, and the demand is no less for the object that insists on being heard. No longer passive visual presence, these objects speak in tongues through the audience that attends them.

Of course, the exhibit is not designed with the opening exclusively in mind, and entering the space at any other time gives an immediately different impression. No longer a social intervention during these quieter times, the sense of Eidola as an exhibit gives way to a visceral realization that it is an installation. Simply put, it is immersive, so that one feels less inclined to marvel at the play of presence and absence than to investigate the complex patterns that take place over time. In particular, these patterns emerge from a doubled bias of sound and vision, where, paradoxically, to see something is already to have answered the question of the origins of sound, to have sighted the ghost. And yet Eidola suggests that this is the point where imagination flips into hallucination, where we begin to perceive that which is not there, even if it used to be. That is, the most marmoreal visions of Eidola—the still Ludbots, the architectural panels, the looming space of the gallery itself—are the most unsettling because we lose our purchase on the line separating the real and the imagined, between the object and its emanations in the myriad sonic tendrils that escape from it. Similarly, there is a sense in which Eidola’s sounds are always heard, as sounds, before they are sounded, before they become the sound of something. That is, in Eidola, we hear a sound by losing ourselves— momentarily—to its ghostly physics: the moment of hearing is one of jarring disjunction and, conversely, the moment that a sound is registered is also the moment that it loses its sound-ness to the collapsed dimensions of our presence. In both its sounds and visions, then, the gambit of Eidola is not an irenic conflation of the senses but a struggle between alternate realities that cannot both, sensibly, be true.

This is precisely what is at stake in False Ruminations, where one intuitively feels the difference between sound and sounds, between an unknowability of sound itself and the sound-objects that contemn this mystery and seek to contain it. We feel this first when we look at the Ludbots, robot instruments that are strange only because they have left their percussionists behind and absconded to the rafters of the gallery. Even if one first spots them while they are suspended in stillness, inverted, there remains the sense that their objective presence is foremost an alibi for an event to come. We hear—with our eyes—a world of possible sounds, even as the work itself is “silent.”

This potentiality is played out in the musical composition of the work, too. Prior to the installation, an initial rhythmic sequence stole from Brent’s hands into the computer, where it quickly propagated into the roughly fifteen thousand sequences that now scurry about the wires. Revolving around a custom algorithm, then, each iteration of False Ruminations is an execution of two transitional processes that take place in parallel: two of these offspring variations are selected as starting points (A, C), and two are selected as ending points (B, D); each performance of the piece is simply the simultaneous convolution of A into B and C into D. The point, then, is that the Ludbots themselves—that is, the robots—exist first as a kind of material detritus of False Ruminations’s sound. They are not instruments per se because they are not instrumental to anything. Instead, they are what is left after the digital commingling has ceased and the algorithmic dust has settled.

This, in fact, is why the Ludbots are ghostly: the distance between them and their performance—the distance between the composition and its interpretation—is closed, because the algorithmic construction of the composition means that it literally does not preexist its performance. That is, the specific contents of A, B, C, and D are determined only in and by the piece’s performance. In turn, this content informs the transitional processes because the latter are calculated as convolved signals of the start and end points (i.e., A and B). In this, then, a paradoxical (non)relation is articulated between the composition and its performance, echoing Serres’s assertion that if a relation is perfectly immediate, “it disappears as a relation [such that] relation is non-relation [and] the real is not rational.”5 That is, we move with the Ludbots from listening to them “play a piece” to simply listening in a place where we no longer have the distance from the piece to stand back and see who is manipulating it as such. Here we are indeed in a ghostly territory where we hear everything—patterns, timbral and spatial groupings, transitions, and progressions—but also know that everything, in a sense, isn’t.

If Brent’s False Ruminations can be so seductive in its aggressive yet rhythmic variations, is this not also because it makes us wait during its periods of nonactivity and, in so doing, incorporates us, too, into its algorithmic process? Ghosted by the very work we witness, the viewer–listener is part of the mathematics of the equation, even if for no other reason than to give us the opportunity to wander into Basement Suite undistracted. And as we do so, the difference between Brent’s and Moffat’s work is marked: whereas False Ruminations sounds an irrational machinic agency through a temporal performance, Basement Suite reveals itself in an objective space of architecture: the small platforms in the piece are hung schematically, referring back to the original layout of Moffat’s own basement. Indeed, ethereal lighting casts shadows on the gallery floors that support the material reference to this other basement architecture with a mythic dimension, working in tandem with the sounds of plaintive flooring to suggest the mysterious foreboding that has long characterized cellars. These salvaged icons of the floating floor, fragmented into only those platforms that matter, ground the underground echoes of times arranged and reanimated. Yet, at the same time that the iconography of a basement anchors the platforms from below, they are physically suspended from above. What we are left inhabiting, then, is neither the basement, nor the floor above it, but rather the boundary between the two, the place where a cozy kitchen becomes a haunted cellar. Indeed, the de facto viewing position supports this liminality, as we stand with our eyes and arms above the flooring panels, but with our feet planted firmly below. In a sense, then, the architecture of Basement Suite mediates an encounter within ourselves.6

However, to the extent that the physical presence of Moffat’s piece disambiguates these two domestic settings, its aural component works in the opposite direction. That is, we expect skeletons and ghosts and mysterious sounds of the past to come from the basement—to come from below—but what we hear beneath us in Basement Suite are sounds from above, sounds of high heels and dancing and tuning forks and dinner parties and the dragging of furniture across the first-level floor. Or rather, we hear these sounds of above from below and above: the speakers through which they are sounded are mounted to the bottom of the platforms, but the platforms are positioned at a height that allows us the option of listening from different vertical vantage points. In this, the platforms themselves are both the basement floor and the basement ceiling so that we inhabit the constitutive ambivalence of this boundary, positioned upside down and right side up at the same time.

If Basement Suite’s sound works in opposition to its physical presence, though, the reverse is also true: because of the simplicity of form in the work’s appearance, a certain vertigo of disappearance takes place. That is, the ambiguity of Moffat’s aural space is only really remarkable for the visions it invokes: ghosts speaking to, dancing with, and rearranging furniture with other ghosts. As a result, Basement Suite shows its logic of the living to be contaminated with “the distinct and always concrete operation of technics,”7 but in an ambivalent way: it is not simply that the house—or the basement—is haunted. Instead, because the piece is immersive, it is we who are doing the haunting (even if we are only haunting ourselves). Moreover, our haunting is also haunted, for who is this haunting “we” if not subjects who are ghostly present?

Thus Eidola explores the incommensurability of sound and vision both within and between the individual works. However, the preponderance of reversals that emerge suggests that this antagonism is not the whole story. Indeed, beyond a co-implication of visual and aural ontologies, Brent’s and Moffat’s works step in to insist on themselves in their own right. The sense of productive antagonism remains, but so, too, does a serendipity that can’t be ignored: as the artists worked to complete their respective works for the exhibition, they were each compelled—without any knowledge of the other—to dramatically change their construction materials. What they arrived at independently were pieces with striking similarities ranging from their sharing a sparse visual aesthetic to their both making prominent use of wood and light industrial materials. Considering that the only curatorial directions given during the production stage were aimed at emphasizing the disciplinarily informed differences between the artists, this confluence is truly remarkable.

In fact, these similarities ultimately play an important role in the exhibition as a whole. Emphatically, they do not suture the gaps that Eidola unearths but rather emphasize the ambivalence with which these gaps signify. Thus, for example, if the teleological orientation of False Ruminations—the fact that each iteration moves through a predefined, audible process—serves to orient the piece as an atemporal object in space, this very “object-ness” is amplified by Basement Suite to paradoxically point to the indeterminate temporal framing within which the piece exists—indeterminate because it hinges on the embodied—and thus singular—activities of the listeners who move with the piece. Similarly, though, Basement Suite certainly articulates an architectural space that can be perceived objectively, from different angles; and yet, doesn’t a melody of sorts begin to emerge in it—not only in its creeks, crackles, and complaints but also in the panels that lie lithely still superjacent to these sounds, a strain that is all the more tuneful for the abrasive intrusions of False Ruminations?

What Eidola makes, then, is a claim that sound might act as dark matter in the exhibition; it might act, that is, as a kind of presensory organizing principle from which the relations that make sense of its collisions of sound and vision emerge. If this is the case, though, Eidola also suggests that its sound—like relation for Serres—is also nonsound, just as dark matter is also peripherally visible (in that its effects are seen when we look elsewhere). In this latter formulation, then, a tautological bias is installed in the exhibit because it justifies its claims—necessarily—through the same logic that the claims themselves are made. Simply put, if sound is the ground of Eidola’s sound–vision relation, this status is itself dependent on a notion of both sound and vision that preexists the exhibit. That is, the sound of Eidola is haunted by both sound and vision, by an unavoidable ambivalence that it stands in for.

If Eidola is predicated on a sense of disjunction between sound and vision, then, this disconnection is felt through a kind of sixth sense that intermingles these strata (even if it does not literally connect them) without being determined by them. This, then, is the mixed reality of sound and vision that Eidola institutes, a dark matter that congeals these opposed senses into a sound exhibit (i.e., into Eidola) that somehow makes sense: we hear Basement Suite as much with our eyes as our ears, just as the temporal algorithmic logic of False Ruminations is seen, with our ears, as an identifiable unit (that is, as a “piece,” in the musical sense). The exhibition’s oppositions each flow into one another, then, at the same speed that they fly apart through the works’ similarity to one another. The point, ultimately, is that Eidola’s sound and vision do not reproduce in the way of Dyens’s cultural bodies, memetically transferring their own (non)genetic materials. Instead, they resonate with one another in time to a ghostly trajectory that is not contained in either of them, individually.

In the same sense that Eidola performs a dark matter of relation (i.e., a presensory sound), it is a kind of dark matter that Hayles is pointing to in the short but devastating critique that she levels against Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene: unpacking the slippery rhetoric of Dawkins’s argument, Hayles shows how Dawkins sneaks a “motive force” into his argument by undermining the importance of his characterization of the gene as a protagonist (he puts it down to his own “sloppy language”). In contrast, Hayles demonstrates that this force is necessary for Dawkins’s argument to function causally, rather than being a simple description of “shifts in populations that can be statistically measured.”8 This shift, then, combines with Dawkins’s radical decontextualization of genetic processes9 to allow him to solidify his own agency “even as he supposedly gives it away.”10 Thus, though Dawkins is completely invisible within the selfish gene narrative, Hayles notes that he is nonetheless located—or rather, that a particular construction of Dawkins is located—in the authorial pull that he exerts on it.11

What Eidola says about dark matter, though, is slightly different than what is evidenced in Hayles’s argument with Dawkins, if not necessarily opposed to it. In Eidola, the sound of dark matter undermines the cultural bodies of sound and vision (i.e., undermines their representations of materials as sonic or visual), but this sound is itself haunted. In short, Eidola stages an argument with dark matter, an argument that ends with the insistence that just because the terms (i.e., sound and vision) are questionable, that doesn’t mean that we ought not to use them. Neither, though, does the necessity to use them mean that we ought not perpetually interrogate the exclusions by which they proceed. In Eidola’s dark matter, then, sound and vision are ghosted into their full ambivalence: on one hand, the relationality of sound is the outside of vision, that which is excluded from visual identity, that which exceeds the speed of light by never casting a shadow, the “invisible . . . [that] remains heterogeneous to the visible”;12 on the other hand, the relationality of sound is included in vision as its constitutive outside, as that which is necessary for identity, as that which has no speed because it has no positive-substantial materiality. As such, we can also hear the pull of this dark matter—the pull of sound itself, performed in a theater of vision—as a push, we can hear the movement to relativize vision to sound as the double-move to consolidate sound itself, a relational nonrelation, in the language of vision.

Ghosting Judith Butler, we might note that the magic in every good magic trick is worked in its setup: if the magic of science is that it allows us not only to see in the dark but to see the dark itself, the trick lies in the fact that the darkness that science addresses was never really dark but only invisible.13 Darkness isn’t illuminated by science, which would be to make it contingently visible and thus to feed this contingency back onto reality itself. Instead, darkness is robbed of its darkness by science precisely because it is rendered invisible, because it is always dark matter; the constitutive ahistoricity of the language of the universe is always citationally and historically constituted through the language of history, which is in our time the language of science. The term dark matter, then, is the constative claim that it isn’t “all relative” after all, a constative claim that simultaneously performs the insistence that it is all relative, but radically so.

Thus what Dyens finds in Dawkins is not just bias built into science but a point where science is haunted by the necessity of having such uninterrogated presuppositions. Indeed, this observation is what is performed in his intervention and marks both its merit and limit: in Metal and Flesh, a discourse of Darwinian evolution is rendered as a discourse, which is to say it is reduced to the descriptions that attest to its truth. In this, the discourse becomes weightless: it is no longer anything but a reproductive performance, exchanging in itself rather than life and circulating without reference or circumference.

This same hyperrelativity—outside the language of physics—takes place in a different way in Eidola, which performs a productive antagonism of sound and vision that speaks in ghostly tongues of an orientation that underwrites them both. In this sense, Eidola is ultimately an installation of the psyche, in all its genetically and semiotically underdetermined wonder: it doesn’t so much institute new technological realities as it opens the door to a reality of hallucination and imagination. In this context, the disjunctions that constitute Eidola’s rhetoric are reframed by its performance: disjunction doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t have a negative value, when instruments play themselves with slow-rhythm syntax and neural networks speak in fractured tongues, strangely singing along. Here ghosts grow voices of their own that emphasize the connections between automated voice, sound, and presence. But in this emphasis, paradoxically, it is precisely the disappearances that emerge, front and center. These disappearances are confrontational because they won’t go away: they are hauntings but also real voices that are reproduced in phantom spaces; they are ghosts in the machines that also ghost those that surround them, implicating their very audience in the witnessing of impossibility. After all, what are ghosts if not autonomic consciousness—automated intentionalities that infiltrate the gallery space—daring us to insist that we are different?14

Ultimately, then, every ghost is a sound too, a lingering heartbeat that came from somewhere and somehow strangely persists—persists perhaps even precisely because its strangeness refuses to be reincorporated back into a world of forces, pulls, and identity. Eidola’s sounds have no sensible material presence: they separate from their origins to travel—out of body—until they collide into us and reintegrate. Ghosts from the past, they haunt us with their relentless chatter, even while their voices dissipate into the world, the speed of their fading exactly equal to a speed of sound that, because it is slower than light, grounds the latter.