Annihilation Event ☄

Annihilation Event has no singular origin, but many strands and streams. This is a project about copies, prints, scans, derivations, reconstructions, casts, and virtual models.

The 6 day programme in the Lethaby Gallery will bring together a contrary group of artists, archivists, archaeologists, historians, technical experts and theorists from all over Europe. The scheduled events will operate as an experiment, an exchange, a chance to inhabit the Lethaby with a constellation of objects, machines, speculative processes and performances, an unprecedented opportunity for collisions and collusions.

In particle physics, annihilation is the process that occurs when a subatomic particle collides with its respective antiparticle to produce other particles. Scientists record this encounter with complex detectors, but the image you see here is an annihilation event recorded in photographic emulsion by the AEgIS Collaboration at CERN. It is a media archaeological event. The photographic emulsion is scanned under an automatic microscope with a minute depth of field and each layer is digitized. This information has been complied into a 3D image that can be rotated to see the annihilation event from all angles.

A particle collision is a useful metaphor for the unruly and generative process of transdiciplinary exchange, of bringing disciplines and generations into contact: the productive ground of cultural participation. That exchange is something that we see at the root, or the radical, of art school present and future. Our 3D imaging project has produced a ruin of the Granary building and in that sense has un-formed our inherited institutional structures. What we are figuring out here relies not so much on the shell of a building, but on its infrastructures, connections and collectives built by affiliation: a facilitation of workflows.

"Rather than new critiques, it is new cartographies that we need. Cartographies not of the Empire, but of the lines of flight out of it.
How is it to be done? We need maps. Not maps of what is off the map, but navigation maps. Maritime maps. Orientation tools. That do not try to explain or represent what lies inside the different archipelagos of desertion, but tell us how to reach them. Portolan Charts."

Tiqqun, How is it to be done? in An Introduction to Civil War (translated by Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E Smith). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010