PIA VAN GELDER
/ WORK / CREATIVE WORK:
IRON STAR, 2017, collaboration with Thomas Smith. Commissioned and exhibited at UTS Gallery for Sounding the Future.Video, sound, iron, metal.
Detail of Iron Star, 2017, Pia van Gelder & Thomas Smith
Pythagoreans proposed that the movement of the orbiting sun, moon and planets around the earth produced sound. This ‘music of the spheres’ prefigured ongoing discourse around sound and space. Some Pythagoreans reasoned that this celestial chord wasn’t heard playing in the background because we had learnt to filter out. Whereas Aristotle was confident that if the planets did hum, our world would shatter due to the immense scale of their corresponding vibrations. Aristotle’s hypothetical is an early iteration of circular debates around the (im)possibility of non-anthropocentric perception—debates that continue to take up space in contemporary philosophy.
Iron Star reframes these questions by thinking through the possibility of an iron future. In the distant future, approximately 10 to the power of 1500 years from now, it is theorised that all matter will converge to its most stable nuclear form, iron—the last element a star produces before it goes supernova. In this future, when earth is no longer, the galaxy will be filled with giant stars of iron, transformed through a process of cold fusion. The temperature will be unfathomably cold. Lingering stellar energy, leftover heat from the stars’ earlier plasma form, will result in enormous fluctuating electromagnetic fields. No human can accurately conceive of this iron universe. By this time our bodies will have long since disappeared. There will be no sound. There will be no light.
Iron Star projects into the furthest possible reaches of the future, and upon failing to imagine it, returns to the symbolic universe in which iron is but one of countless signifiers. Iron Star depicts the final state of the universe as a set of processes that will end humanity—while concurrently, iron’s use value and symbolic efficacy is shown proliferating into an array of human centric objects, derivatives and metaphors. Within Iron Star, as in the universe more generally, iron exists ambivalently as language, material, object, symbol, and future—but also as the immanent cancellation of all these strata of reality.
More information about the Sounding the Future Project here.
Iron Star, 2017, installation view, Pia van Gelder & Thomas Smith, Sounding the Future, UTS Gallery, 2017, photo David Lawrey