FRANÇOIS BUCHER | CONTACT

François Bucher

“…I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars.”

A phrase by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) from his short story The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), which expresses—as if it were a Russian doll or Matryoshka—the nature of the story’s plot, where each event contains the key to another event, ad infinitum.

Radio telescopes “listen” to background noise and in so doing they also dis- cover thenoise of time. e portrait of the entire universe shown here is a portrait of noise. However, that noise only makes sense to the cosmic background noise explorer. What we see in the image is, again, the product of cutting- edge radio astronomy using anisotropy and/ or polarization in order to discover the history and the identity of waves, their origin and direction. What is interesting about this image is that we are not seeing small dots of colored stars against a spatial backdrop.

The sections of dots are actually spacetime moving as a wave (galaxy clusters) atop what we currently refer to as dark matter. In other words, everything we refer to as real is now a wave of this ocean, and the seabed where the waves roll, is located in a place that we cannot (yet) fathom.

As a complementary piece to the image of cosmic noise, there is a pair of seashell earphones. e traveler initiated in the art of rowing amidst waves of noise does not actually move; it is through the noise that they are able to connect and reduce all distances and times to zero. They make contact with the entrails (not mere trails) of the universe, which have the same proportions as the labyrinth of their inner ear, the golden ratio, Phi.

The deer horns tattooed with the Milky Way are a simple metaphor of contact. The word Anthropocene has yet to be mentioned in relation to this project; however, there is a connection with the vision that underlies this term, which is able to fracture the seemingly eternal opposition between the cultural and the natural.

The Sami people, who inhabit the northern regions of the planet, were nomads throughout their entire history, and their technique of contact was to be guided by other beings that had more elaborate antennae than theirs. These sentient beings possess what biologists in recent years have come to call “culture,” following new evidence that contradicts everything we thought we understood at the time of our ill-founded superiority complex. Following the logic of year-long deer migration patterns, the diagram of the herd’s movements always drew a real and invisible mandala on the ground. Everything had intrinsic meaning, as everything was in contact with the most basic elements of the Earth and its movements in the universe.