Fragile-graphy is an artmaking research-led filmic installation probing what it means to make a drawing of “fragility”. Referencing the fragile processes of atomic isolation within the “seeing” apparatuses at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT), the artwork explores concepts of fragility by drawing with light.              

Graphia is the Greek word for writing, but it can also mean drawing—or making graphic. Fragile-graphy is a form of drawing (forth) of fragility: a subject matter that seems to evade full expression on the drawing medium. The architects and drawing-researchers Louise De Brabander, Thierry Lagrange, and Jo Van Den Berghe write that “there is fragility in both the material and mental space, but we do not understand it yet”, largely because its intangibility as phenomenon makes it hard to pinpoint beyond mere aesthetic and indexical representation.[1] As such, this artmaking process tussles with concepts of fragility, asking how to see (with) this phenomenon which is otherwise more readily sensed through haptic means.  

Witnessing fragility in the isolation apparatuses in the quantum physics laboratory, the artwork develops methods for drawing fragility, derived from the dialogues between the artist and scientists, during visits to the CQT laboratories. The drawing-research process is divided into two parts, referencing key learnings (and experiences) from seeing fragility in the atomic-isolation laboratories, which were then developed into a series of drawing operations, that build up into the artwork “Fragile-graphy”.

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Pinpointed Cosmologies

Inside the quantum physics laboratory, I entered an eerily still and minutely small world of lights and magic. Pieces of angled glass emanated with shining lasers, pinpointing the fragile presence—or the fleeting absence—of darting atomic particles, inside the space of the laboratory, inside the experimental world of the isolation chamber. Microcosm—the cosmic in a micro-city of little black boxes, shiny metal bits and glowing glass lenses, sprang to life. I could not help but imagine within the isolation chamber were these small building windows glittering with electric lights, set against the surrounding blackness of the night sky. Then I thought we were looking at life itself, but not quite so as well. It was hard to grapple what was pinpointed in our midst: both inanimate particulate object yet erratic tiny dot moving with so much ‘liveliness’—Schrodinger points existing through presences and absences, being there and not there. Pinpointed holes, reconstructing into imaginary lines, then surfaces, then volumes, then cities, then cosmologies. Then whole ephemeral and fleeting cosmologies are fed as probability data and fixed as dotted geometries onto the surface of the screen: pinpointed holes and lighted pixels; manipulated atoms, invented geometries; speculative materialities, future cosmologies.

On the drawing board, the drawn line reduces into its most basic unit: the dot. Graphically speaking, digital images are composed of fine pixels; and whole drawn worlds can be rendered down into distinct dots: ink, graphite, particles hooked on papery surfaces. But a hole is another kind of dot. It is a puncture into a surface: a point not made of ink pigments or graphite particles. It is a point made of absences—an absence of material, a torn bit of surface. A hole, reminding us that the surface has a thickness constituted by two sides, an inner depth, and an ephemeral micro-cosmology that lies somewhere behind the perceived surface.

[1] Louise De Brabander, Thierry Lagrange, and Johan Van Den Berghe, “Pinpointing Fragility Through the Act of Drawing as a Moment of Embodiment,” in Research & Education in Design: People & Processes & Products & Philosophy, ed. Rita Almendra and Joao Ferreira (Leiden: CRC Press/Balkema, 2020), 128.