Joséphine Michel, from The Heat Equation

摘要

The group of photographs presented here have been selected by Joséphine Michel from herphotobook, The Heat Equation, published 1 November 2019, to accompany a live recordingof the musician Mika Vainio’s last performance in the UK (Ramsgate, August 2016). The tenimages, composed and juxtaposed as diptychs, were taken primarily in science museums: theScience Museum in London, the History of Science Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum inOxford, the Royal Belgium Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, and the Glasgow BotanicGardens. The project was sadly occasioned by the death of Vainio, with whom Michel hadpreviously created the sound-image composite, Halfway to White. Michel had also writtenabout Vainio’s work for Optical Sound (No. 5) and created the cover image for his recording,Fe304 - Magnetite. The imaginary world evoked by Vainio’s soundscapes is suggestivelyre-captured in Michel’s images, which are also poised between a scientific and a lyricalengagement with materiality.