Blanca Pujals

A Synthetic Universe: The Unmaking of Microscopic Bonds in Transnational Space. Trailer Cut. 2019

HD Video with sound. 5’37’’

Halluci.nation 2019

HD Video with sound. 4’37’’

Spyglass 2022

HD Video no sound. 33’’

Extremo.files 2021

HD Video with sound. 3’04’’

The four videos are fragments of the wider project ‘A Synthetic Universe’, about the geopolitics and spatial articulations of Particle Physics, looking at its laboratories and experiments – more specifically neutrino detectors, Antarctic scientific bases and the particle collider CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva). The project examines the complex implications of Soft Power within the field of fundamental science. It examines, what is often referred to as ‘Science for Peace’, through transnational political treaties and through the material infrastructures and architectures of the network of deep underground laboratories that have been developed across the globe for the exploration of fundamental physics. These complex sites constitute what I have termed sensing infrastructures, that amplify new political and material interactions offering a multiscalar, entangled organism of scientists, particles, liquids, data, politics and technologies working together for the production of knowledge and to unveil its social, political and territorial impacts on local, regional, national and global levels.

A Synthetic Universe. In 2018, I have been invited for a fieldtrip at CERN by Monica Bello, Head of Arts Department at CERN. A Synthetic Universe, narrates through archival footage from different fonts but mainly from CERN’s historical archive (©CERN), the different infrastructural levels of fundamental physics laboratories and more specifically the ambivalent neutrality of Science regarding the entanglements with the politics and collaborations involved in their creation and their research. This video, it is a shorter version made from extracts of the three-channel video installation 'A Synthetic Universe. The Unmaking of Microscopic Bonds in Transnational Space'.

Halluci.nation, is a short video made as first test of footage shoot during my fieldtrip to Antarctica. In the Antarctic summer of 2018-2019 I spent one-month in the Chilean navy boat Aquiles, invited with another four artists to an art and science expedition to the continent. After two days of sailing the wild Drake sea, we arrived to the western coast of Antarctica where we visited different scientific bases meeting scientists, engineers and the community living and working in one of the most remote lands on Earth. My trip to Antarctica was driven because of my interest in The Antarctic Treaty, which made Antarctica the territory for Science and Peace.

Spyglass is a short test video made of pictures of the Antarctic ice coast the first time we approached it, calibrating my senses to the vast territory I had in front of me.

Extremo.files reveals the evidence and first test of footage shoot during my fieldtrip at Canfranc Underground Laboratory (Aragon, Spain) in August 2020, invited by Carlos Peña Garay, theoretical physicist and director of the laboratory. Canfranc is one of the deep underground laboratories in the world, below the Spanish French border, for the study of neutrino physics, dark matter and other unusual phenomena in nature that require very low environmental radioactivity to be observed. Parasitizing an old railway tunnel and shielded from cosmic rays by 800meters of rock under the Mount Tobazo, the little team of scientists coexist with machines they care, inhabiting with other extremophiles the unique ecosystem of the caverns of the laboratory.

Blanca Pujals is an architect, writer and PhD candidate at Northumbria University.