We Felt a Star Dying

Laure Prouvost

Moving through the threshold of The Beginning’s delicate threads, Prouvost invites us to shift our perspective with a video projected overhead. Titled We Felt a Star Dying, the video navigates various entities and scales of reality, highlighting quantum as a shared feature of all matter, living or non-living, natural or artificial, near or far. Its journey begins in the installation, moving outward through carpet, cables and concrete. As Prouvost narrates this voyage, she grapples with the conceptual shift required to understand and centre quantum principles. The video is interwoven with segments that were created through a novel experiment with data from a quantum computer. Prouvost used a range of cameras and editing techniques to capture different scales and perspectives, including a microscopic camera, a drone and thermal imaging. She also worked with acrobats and filmed subjects beneath glass to evoke a sense of weightlessness and disorientation. This unmoors the video — and its viewers — from fixed horizons and traditional vantage points, enabling it to be experienced from any direction. The installation’s soundscape and video are scored by composer, producer and singer KUKII. She approached the score as a way to generate space and tension between what is seen and felt. Her sonic palette emphasises raw vocals that feel intimate, vulnerable and uncertain. It’s primarily built from found recordings of devotional singing traditions from different regions of the world. She incorporated quantum noise to add its textures to her selection of found recordings, and then wove this into a new composition with lyrics written by Prouvost and Paul Buck. The resulting soundscape drifts between dissonance and harmony, converging into melodic choruses before unravelling once again.