‘Material Halo’ is an interactive, video and sound installation exploring the impossibility of dark matter and the limits of perception.

In an immersive experience, the viewer is invited to inspect a dish of water sprinkled with spices, dirt and small rocks, lit from above by a small torch. An eerie soundscape envelops the room, rumbling underneath a viewing platform forming intermittent ripples on the water. As torchlight touches the water’s surface tiny particles are illuminated, becoming a scattering of stars, the torchlight resembling a glowing sun or moon. The experience is expanded by an old school handycam hanging above, capturing the tiny cosmos and transforming it live into an enormous video projection on the wall.

Viewers can distort the cosmos by running their fingers through the water or blowing on its surface, new suns can be created by shining a phones torch tp the dish.The worlds created in ‘Material Halo’, reference some of the unexplained phenomena of the cosmic world such as dark matter and dark halo’s. 

A dark halo is one of the few material effects thought to measure the presence of dark matter, or absence of measurable matter which is captured by enormous sophisticated equipment. Our ‘Material Holo’ creates a fictional  cosmos through materials from everyday life.

‘Material Halo’ is a collaborative expansion of an earlier video  project ‘Microcosmic’.

‘Material Halo’is by Shae Rooke, Jess Dubblu with with spatial sound and vibration design by Garth Sheridan’. Exhibited at The Substation as part of Neighbourhood Festival 2022.