One Hundred Million Ghosts (2019)

The artwork One Hundred Million Ghosts is a vast ‘sonic’ black hole formed using the sound of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and thousands of fragments of human voices collected from many parts of the world. Hundreds of tiny speakers will be mounted on a huge circular array, each of them carrying the sound of the individual looping voices, sonic fragments of our world trapped on the event horizon of the black hole. Hundreds of voices are heard at any one time interweaved with the sound of the CMB. The looping voices on the edge of the event horizon will repeat until they become too volatile to be contained and will suddenly become louder just at the moment of their disintegration, a sudden sonic moment, each event a death where all is lost into the abyss.

Recent research describes the event horizon of the black hole as fecund, composed of miniscule fragments of matter, gases and things that are arrested on their journey into the void. We might now look upon the event horizon as an abundant entity, an eternal repository of the debris of other worlds. In their 2016 paperi Hawking and his collaborators postulate that stripped down information drawn towards the black hole gets caught on ‘hairs’ on the event horizon and are held in a holographic form. The event horizon is a place where quantum field theory meets general relativity. This rich surface or boundary both challenges, and may reconcile our understanding of the mechanics of much more than just our universe. Here the two major theories of cosmological research allow us to imagine theories such as 3D information stored in 2D forms. Concepts such as information stored on the boundary of an event horizon in a holographic form and gravity as an emergent property of entanglement are fascinating and point toward not only a physical and scientific boundary but also a conceptual boundary, a leap from this gravity bounded existence here on earth. Event horizons are edges of our universe and are comprised of new forms of compressed life, an embryonic archive full of the potential to form new worlds.At a time when our continuing living on the earth may be doubtful, One Hundred Million Ghosts is a lament to what is at stake and what might be lost.