Max-Louis Raugel

Note On the Sound Component of the Exhibition

The night I was offered to participate in this show I stayed up late thinking and woke up before dawn. I have always been curious about science—going into detail, abstract logic and the deep relation to nature that goes with it.

As a child, I particularly enjoyed the maths classes for instance. They take a grip on you, you don’t know what’s making your mind work its way through. In the end you’re also just feeling what’s right, like a game, based on rules and axioms on a bottom-most layer that you also have to accept from intuition.

Back then I wanted to study astrophysics, until one day I realised that all I had in mind was the stars and cosmos, not really the equations, diagrams and lab atmosphere. That same day I also found out that i could ‘see’ things with my eyes closed, either imagined or remembered, quite clearly, and I was drawn to that possibility—the life of the senses and imagination. I thought of it as an empirical science—to seek out from perception and feeling rather than mediated through a symbolic language.

This brings me to the title of the show “Sensation Quantique” and its multidisciplinary nature. It’s an art show on a scientific subject and with a scientific com-mittee. It’s an immersive sensorial experience about phenomena too small to even touch. This all raises questions about how ideas can be communicated and translated across disciplines as well as the relationship between logic and sensuality.

As a part of a research-creation project, we are a team of scientists, researchers and artists. We got to meet each other in order to seek common inspiration and dia-logue, which is in itself immensely valuable. The line is often difficult to cross as these fields are highly specific. Yet at the root they are all expressions of our human curiosity, our desire to probe the world around us. I feel that there is something deeply meaningful about con-necting these communities that deal with the unknown and depend on moments of research and experimen-tation, often without utilitarian concerns.

Perhaps the aim is not only to learn about physics, or to be entertained by images and sound—perhaps it has to do instead with mystery, with engaging with a subject and material that feels alive, elusive, at the bottom or

our living fabric—something which isn’t fully under-standable but slowly reveals itself, audible in murmurs and promises, and which we are paying homage to. Perhaps it has to do with accepting uncertainty.

For a moment I hope you might sense how much larger and surprising the world really is, and maybe you’ll reset somewhere on a personal level. As you’re reading this you may have other thoughts running in parallel, an inner monologue or something less constructed – fleeting ideas and desires which may seem unobserva-ble or hard to catch. It’s never just what we think on the surface, and there is much to learn in looking beyond.