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Silver Particle / Bronze (After Henry Moore).

"In Simon Starling’s work, inanimate objects are activated in various ways, especially when their political or economic history is revealed or when their materiality becomes an embodiment of something discovered during his research. His work enables and celebrates diverse interpretations of objects in many instances, as Greenblatt (1991) notes when referring to artistic and curatorial activity, deflecting attention away from the object onto the systems that gave rise to it in the first place. Starling conducts a close inspection of his objects, usually following a web of connections across the globe and across history, which in many of his works lead him back to the starting point; a vintage photograph of a Henry Moore sculpture leads to the production of a bronze sculpture based on the shape of a single enlarged silver particle that makes up the photograph and which, when converted into a sculpture, resembles the biomorphic shapes that served as inspiration for the Moore sculpture in the original vintage photograph ('Silver particle/bronze (after Henry Moore)', 2008). The machinations of its history somehow lost in the image when seen in the museum archive come back into play through the translations and reconstructions encountered in the detour and are materialised in the exhibition format" (Liebenberg 2021: 26 - 28).
Diving the Tacoma Narrows Bridge

"All that debris still remains under the bridge for the most part, and it has become a dive site. It is a very difficult dive site to get to because of the swiftly moving water and the very short period of slack time. Nature in this area has just a tremendous ability to take over. You have a man-made structure like the Tacoma Narrow Bridge that collapsed into the water. Very quickly, the ocean took it over and made it part of the habitat". Extract from the voiceover of trailer for 700 Feet Down (a documentary about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge told through witnesses of the bridge’s 1940 demise as well as intrepid divers exploring a reef of wreckage, ultimately reflecting on how history influences the present)
Resonance

Image from page 137 of the 'Curiosity CLXXV' catalogue, describing resonance and its application in MRI technology.
Wave

Screengrab of an image search, typing in 'third wave'
Resonance

"The revelation of my object-study that the chest was a lacuna in terms of local botanical medicinal remedies and practices served as inspiration for the first department I approached. By engaging with insiders of the Department of Biological Sciences, I reasoned that I could supplement the chest’s Western content with local botanical knowledge. As the first viewing session, it was also the one that initiated the weakening of the chest’s imperial viral load through an inoculation of additional meaning – a treatment with a surprising side-effect. On presenting the chest to other disciplinary insiders afterwards (to Pathology and the College of Music, for example), I noticed characteristics that also resonated with the field of botany within these disciplines and their collections. These botanical resonances accrued as my disciplinary engagements increased and diversified, leading me to embrace this side-effect and to use botany as the central theme of my exhibition. The resonances generated in the different departmental viewing sessions resulted in new links with the chest but also in connections surfacing between disciplines such as zoology, dermatology, pharmacology and sound studies, for example. I drew on these visits and their outcomes to create a range of artworks that materialised the inoculation of the chest by manifesting how intersecting with diverse fields expanded its meaning, and I sourced objects from the collections that encouraged new interpretations" (Liebenberg 2021: 244 - 246).
Resonance

Demonstration of sympathetic vibration using the optical (flame) microphone
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge

The old Tacoma Narrows bridge was named Galloping Gertie because it vibrated rather strongly whenever there was a little wind due to resonance, the property which most objects have, of vibrating more strongly when exposed to an external force which is itself vibrating at the object's natural frequency. Crossing Gertie was actually quite a popular thing to do, similar to riding a roller-coaster. On November 7, 1940, things changed for the worse however. It was a day of rather high winds which caused Gertie to take on a 30-hertz transverse vibration with an amplitude of 1½ feet. This developed into a twisting motion of about 14 hertz, which then tore the bridge in two. The only victim of the disaster was a three-legged Cocker Spaniel, Tubby, left in the back seat of a lone car abandoned on the bridge.