The Quiet Ground

video, research

The Quiet Ground is a video essay approaching the underground of Lower Lusatia as an epistemic terroir allowing for gravitational waves to be detected and thus co-shaping humanity’s on the universe. Since high frequency waves dissipate realtively fast, everything that happened shortly after big gang is now just low frequency waves. For the planned gravitational wave detector’s operation, the seismic silence of the underground is a prerequirement. Lower Lusatia’s geology, its population and their values co-constitute an environment fostering of waves rpeserving information on the early universe.

More about this work︎︎︎

To find the best location for the low seismic lab hundreds of boreholes are being drilled 250m deep in the Lusatian bedrock. The boreholes’ characteristics are providing an overall image of the underground of the region. A 360° scan of one of the boreholes is running as thread through the video-essay. As we travel down into its depth we understand that it is not a chronological journey backwards in time. The layers deposited in the underground are difficult to date. Yet, at the bottom of the borehole we are in the seismic silence, in a condition where we can detect low frequency gravitational waves dating back to the moments right after big bang. In Lusatia,  the deep undergound and the furthest reaches of the outer space merge. The mysteries of what is beyond the sky feature the underground’s mysteries.

Stills from The Quiet Ground.

Lower Lusatia presents a sort of technological terroir (Messeri 2024) providing not only physical and chemical conditions for the gravitational wave telescope but also conditioning its use.  Knowledge production is thus determined by the landscape and by a set of local values and practices allowing for the gravitational-wave detector to operate.

The project has been developped in collaboration with DZA (German Centre for Astrophysics).