Current and ongoing climates of inequality and breakdown—sometimes articulated in terms like Anthropo-/Capitalo-cene—require truly novel forms of sense and description if they are to be critically addressed. With a focus on relationality (and its valuing of difference and multiplicity) this critical workshop will be structured around the logics, contents, and contexts of artistic researcher Jol Thomson’s fieldworks with remote Landscape-Laboratories: vast experimental cosmological observatories—cubic kilometre assemblages developed to sense the imperceptible.

Working along the edges of matter and meaning with/in experimental (astro-) particle physics and neutrino and dark matter detection, Thomson shares his approach to multiple ongoing fieldworks and his research in critical theory, contemporary physics, environmental studies, new materialisms, and the histories and philosophies of science. How can a sensitive approach to these complex holographic sites open us towards the more-than-non-human? Can the powerful histories and practices of science and technology be resuscitated as allies in critical environmental and decolonial thought?

We will be rethinking environments, times, agents, and spaces, while foregrounding the boundary making processes at the heart of our contemporary crises. Sci-fi-esque Landscape-Laboratories and their weird, imperceptible objects of detection offer substantial anarchic critiques of the foundations of objective rationality itself, the very logics of Western physics and metaphysics. With Thomson’s critical quantum geography of the imperceptible, that is unafraid of the ineffable, we will explore nonscalar sites and encounter unbound situations that challenge traditional sense, logic, and binaries. These encounters will help us to feel and confront the “thought that dwells at the edge of thought, another mode altogether."11Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked The Right Questions? \(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016\).