Susan Schuppli at Sonic Acts 2016, photo by Pieter Kers

This presentation tries to shed light on the various ways in which materials come to matter in my research and artistic practice. Through investigative processes that involve an engagement with technical and scientific modes of inquiry, I try to open up new conceptual pathways into the material strata of our world. Exploring the capacities of art to invent categories of critical assembly that bring science, media, politics, law, and aesthetics into productive relay with one another remains one of my key challenges. In order to reflect upon this provocation, I will open up my research archive and together we will delve through some of the paradigmatic cases that I have worked on over the past decade. We will listen-in on 18 and a half minutes of machined silence from the infamous Watergate Tape 342 in which absence– in the form of a technical erasure – became incontrovertible evidence of political malfeasance. We will cross-examine a video alibi from the ICTY in which trees would come to stand as silent witnesses to a war crime in the Balkans. We will hear a story about the sound of sand, which sent a Trident nuclear submarine on a three-month mission to track down an errant frequency. We will follow a trail of radioactive isotopes from their localised conditions of production through to their global networks of microflows as they distribute their invisible contaminants across the planet. In each of these cases, material evidence for a crime has evaded its easy detection and capture by conventional modes of witnessing, or operates far beyond the threshold of human perception.