G24|0vßß is an audiovisual composition investigating new forms of relation, degrees of sensitivity, and modes of observation achieved through highly unusual means: engaging the intangible and entangled worlds announced through technologies in neutrino physics. The project grapples with the challenges and aesthetic adventures unfurled through these technologies and their collaborative relationships with non-human beings, matter, and ecologies. Jol Thomson has developed a novel aesthetic for diffracting the entangled site of the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) at the National Laboratory of Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Italy where physicists from several countries are searching for a theoretical process known as double beta decay without neutrino emissions, or 0v.

Filming this work entirely in and around CUORE, the artist allowed himself to dream into the coldest piece of matter in the universe, resulting in a composition that navigates the indistinguishable boundary between technology and nature, and between our immediate environment and the cosmos at large.

The neutrino, an imperceptible, neutral subatomic particle with a mass close to zero, rarely reacts with normal matter. Their inherent neutrality has led to neutrinos—millions of which are penetrating our bodies and the world around us at any given moment—being referred to as “cosmic messengers,” given that the particles enter our environment from the farthest reaches of outer space in an unaltered state.

Crucially, the Gran Sasso Mountain is itself essential to the CUORE experiment, protecting the cryostat from the abundant high energy particles in our atmosphere: the mountain has become indistinguishable from technology—and technology inseparable from mountain. A montage of psychedelic video sequences, punctuated with quotes from Stanisław Lem’s science fiction novel His Master’s Voice (1968), G24|0vßß documents the flora and fauna of the mountain as well as the human interventions that have transformed it into one of the most sophisticated pieces of technology on the planet.