| CLOUDCHAMBER Pastimes & Pleaasures in historic Lambeth ARTISTS BOOK, 2004 Edition of 8 Cloth bound with screenprinted cover Pendrell Luke & Branagan Ben |
The doud chamber is a glass-domed chamber filled with moist vapour.
When atomic particles pass through the chamber they leave a cloud-like track much like the vapour trail of a jet plane.
Sometimes called 'nuclear ghosts' these traces and trails are the echoes of the invisible sub atomic particles permeating our world. Some trails derive from radiation sources here on earth, some are cosmic rays travelling through the atmosphere and us as they make their way through the universe.
The first cloud chamber was invented in 1896 by Charles T.R. Wilson at The Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He discovered that charged particles traveling through this device would leave
"thin, wispy trails"
Could meaning be coerced from them through some dark Glyphomancy? Would they yield their secrets to our hermeneutics? Were they symbolic revelations of an unknown reality? Fu chi, spirit writing or the whispering passage of other dimensions?
Spending time wandering through the sleepy streets of South London, you see similarities in the marks adorning the empty billboards and boarded up hoardings to the cloud chamber's ghostly curves.
On the windows of the trains glinting in the spring sunshine, dust fogged, frosted and etched with the scratched signatures of the city sindolent youth. Snaking and rocking through its backgardens in weary convergence.
Tourettic and insoluably cryptic, the innumerable glyphs and graphs ghost the passage of invisible forces and stories like vapour trails or cloud chamber shadows.
Marginal places, fallow and fecund. Silted and sidelined by the ebb and flow of the city's tidal economics. Neither prime real estate nor so called 'non-spaces', they are the self-seeded copses of decline and opportunity. In every country and city you can find them.