Rosa Barba’s Charge is a cinematic exploration of colour and light. The 35mm film combines aerial footage of large-scale solar energy fields, static shots of massive telescopic radio wave sensors, and high-speed 16mm footage of physics lab experiments. Barba’s sources range from computational systems translating celestial readings to inscrutable lines of code and ethereal imagery of cloud chambers used by CERN to study the trace effects of cosmic rays.

The rhythmic, pulsating assemblage is paired with original footage of natural landscapes, radio waves, stellar spheres, scientific apparatuses, and celluloid itself. Inspiration for the work began with the artist’s immersive research at a space observatory in Nançay, central France, where scientists use radio waves to build a picture of the universe.

The footage is combined with a resounding soundtrack—developed with Ellison Renee Glenn and percussionist Chad Taylor— composed from several field recordings and percussive improvisations and cello sounds by the artist. Together sound and image drive a sequence of collisions between eruptive light and rhythmic pulse. As Barba notes “light is the basis of nearly all my work”–whether as the subject of installations, sculptures, and performances that explore astronomical phenomena and human perception, or as a formal element to articulate space, illuminate live motion, or activate other senses. For nearly ten years, Barba has explored the overlaps of science and art. While developing Charge, the artist began working with Puneet A. Murthy, a physicist who studies subatomic particles of light known as photons. Many of the experiments in Charge were captured at research facilities at ETH Zurich, where Barba and Murthy have co-instructed interdisciplinary courses on artistic and scientific understandings of light.

Barba’s interest in light often takes the form of the flicker. The flicker, she observes, is “a magic thing that makes cinema.” Moving at twenty-four frames per second, the darkness between each frame created by the projector’s shutter creates a “25th frame,” a flicker that structures and facilitates our coherent visibility of film. This darkness, this emptying of information, is a space of mental activation that opens up a moment where one can contemplate and imagine.

A spherical motif recurs in Charge, including red orbs and telescopic radio dishes that evoke lenses, orbits, suns, and tunnels. The apertures and hollow forms echo the empirical function of the scientific facilities featured in the film; they serve as portals for peering more deeply into the nature of things. Just as the exposure of celluloid to light allows us to inscribe imagery onto film and yield rich narrative and visual worlds, light itself, Barba demonstrates, can excite matter, transform landscapes, and illuminate new forms of knowledge.