Odes to the art of atoms - part of the group exhibition 'Fabricant Worlds: Matter, machine, imagination' with CSVPA staff, students and alumni and music students from Cambridge University; exhibited at The Henry Royce Institute, Maxwell Centre, Cambridge University March 2026.

Odes to the Art of Atoms responds to encounters at the Henry Royce Institute in Cambridge, where the accelerated discovery of new materials unfolds within highly controlled machinic environments. Walking through the Ambient Cluster Processing Facility, the Battery Suite, the Wolfson Electron Microscope facility, and spaces dedicated to X-ray and Atomic Force Microscopy, I was struck not just by what I saw and heard, but by what I found difficult to understand: a dense terminology of acronyms and technical names. This language felt incantatory. Each name honours discovery, yet conceals worlds of transformation occurring at scales where colour and intuition collapse.

Within Fabricant Worlds, I position myself as an investigator of the material of language: reshaping scientific terminology into quantum poetry. The scientists at the Royce use metaphor beautifully to describe complex processes; I extend this gesture, asking whether meaning itself behaves quantumly. At what point do words resolve from waves into particles? Does attention and context collapse ambiguity into clarity?

Using TouchDesigner’s live, interactive architecture, the work generates a responsive poetic vocabulary. The viewer’s movement sharpens fragments of text while peripheral language dissolves into noise. Environmental sound echoing from the vibration-sensitive infrastructures of the lab modulates colour and form. Just as machinery rests on air-buffered foundations to mitigate disturbance, the artwork balances on thresholds of uncertainty. Unpredictability enters through live input: no iteration fully repeats. Sound can disturb, attention can measure, and language can transform.

The piece imagines a speculative world where scientific understanding becomes a shared aesthetic act and where matter, machine, and meaning are entangled. Rather than aiming for scientific exactitude, “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”* And it matters what poetic dreams make dreams of the machines of tomorrow.

Whilst the exhibit was live, the video above is a recorded performance, including sound manipulated from field recordings at the Henry Royce Institute.

*(Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene)