Dennis Summers

"Slow Light Shadow Matter consists of 13 short digitally created animated videos. It is typically presented on three screens – a square in the middle and two narrow rectangles on both sides. The title itself refers to two concepts from physics. In 1999 scientists “used a new state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate … to bring light down to the speed of a bicycle and then later to a dead halt.” This is called slow light. Shadow matter refers to a hypothetical material “that interacts with ordinary matter, only by gravity, which means hardly at all.” The imagery in SLSM consists of densely montaged computer generated animated imagery, text, music and voice. Each chapter is inspired by an artist and a scientist who were approximate contemporaries. As the focus of each chapter depends on different scientists and artists the aesthetic of each accordingly differs.
Chapter 8: Reality, Another Country (2023) is inspired by inventor of LSD Albert Hoffman, and French painter Pierre Soulages. It is filled with hallucinogenic dream-like imagery, including mythological figures from around the world, and the voice-over content refers to Indigenous Australian “dreaming,” - their method of creating physical reality in real time."