A narrow spectrum, a wild speculation

A narrow spectrum, a wild speculation

Tear open the atom-thin sheet of reality, and peer through the frame you left behind. Can you believe the evidence of your senses? Is this your world, or another? What gave it away?

“What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?” 1

At a far-flung point in an infinite multiverse, you might:

Pointe, rond-des-jambe, plié and - spread metallic wings for balance, Lucanidae formation

Wonder, is that a nebula, sliced into a puzzle of fragments, or merely a sunflower; an owl?

Interpret iconography as a map lighting the way to another dimension, where all is simultaneously futuristic and ancient

Develop a system of optics unable to integrate differing wavelengths of light - dots of colour, everywhere you turn, a permanent pointillism

What is ordinary now?

“And then I began to think, maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans?” 2

Physicists who study dark matter and dark energy (the scotohylogogists), theorise that together, they comprise ninety-five percent of our universe. The most abundant thing in existence is shadowy, embracing and permeating all baryonic matter, cradling us in place. We are powerfully outnumbered by something beyond our perception. To accept how very little we know ignites our imaginations, setting us free to play with the cosmos. If, sub-atomically, light can exist as two opposing forms, a confusion of photons, then – Perhaps galaxies are indeed constructed of paper, or sound woven from layers of drawings – if only we knew where to look.

In Odd fragments, ad infinitum, artists Skye Malu Baker, Kaijern Koo, Michael McCafferty and Elena Misso frame and reframe, layer, magnify and juxtapose – playing with the ordinary to grant it a “strange newness”.3 Instead of making worlds (in the science-fiction sense), they point us to where they already exist – in multitudes, all around and between us. The works act as transformative portals between the banal and the peculiar, and call on us to help form the worlds they frame. To inversely paraphrase Darko Suvic, they make the domestic surprising.

“In order to remain durable, a world needs to be shared, and it needs to be built upon. It needs, in other words, to be paradoxically complete but fragmentary. It needs to have a modular frame.”4

There is a delicacy and a sense of interiority to the works – close examination, fine detail, intimate sizing, subtle use of technology – after all, a world doesn’t need to exclaim, or exist at grand scales, to lure us in. Perhaps this reflects the ways in which the pandemic narrowed and separated our lives (and subsequently altered studio practice), but also knitted us together, via the internet. All our diminished worlds, connected to a virtual infinite alternately fascinating and dull, unfolding before us as if by scientific enchantment. We travelled to each other through closed windows, every one a framing device for our own unique little biosphere.

We know the overarching concerns of science-fiction shift with time, reflecting their various presents – obsession with aliens and space travel; the anthropological and political; dystopian grapplings with technology; reckonings with environmental destruction... Istvan Csicery-Ronay classes the present era as one of pervasive ‘science-fictionality’:

“this widespread normalisation of […] a style of estrangement and dislocation has stimulated the development of science-fictional habits of mind, […] a kind of awareness we might call science-fictionality, a mode of response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction”.5

We can guess that the last few years have only deepened this sense of dislocation and estrangement, in life, and in art. Faced with the world as it is, who wouldn’t want to dream themselves into the potential of another – especially when it’s just a short neural pathway from where you are? With aquiet glimpse into their empirical, phenomenal not-you(s), the artists invite us to step, if not through, then at least up to, their paper thresholds. “Truth is a matter of imagination”7, wrote Ursula K. Le Guin – and, even when all is utterly ordinary, we must imagine new truths, new windows opening, harder than ever before.

Sarah Bunting, 2023.

1 Philip K Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, first published 1978, accessed viahttps://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html

2 Ibid

3 Darko Suvic, Estrangement and Cognition, 1972, p16

4 Dr. Amelia Barikin, Making Worlds in Art and Science Fiction, p2

5 Istvan Csicery-Ronay, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction,

6 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, first published 1969