Material Sight

The Live Creature and Ethereal Things: Physics in Culture is a collection of texts, images and conversations that present fundamental physics and the physics of the universe as human activities and cultural endeavours. Contributions by physicists, artists and curators examine the role of personality, power and culture in physics and discuss the value of cross-pollination between the practices of contemporary art and physics. These reflections shed light on the people and material practices of physics: from the vast underground particle physics laboratory at CERN, Geneva, used by half of the world’s particle physicists, and deep underground neutrino observatories in the UK, Italy and Antarctica, to super-computers that construct astonishing visualisations of the evolution of the universe.
The book is co-edited by artist and academic Fiona Crisp and curator Nicola Triscott. In this chapter Crisp narrates her long-term research project, 'Material Sight' and how she used non-documentary photography and film within the deeply physical spaces of experiemental science to approach the intangible, abstract nature of fundamental physics that operates so far outside the scale of our lived bodies.