Project website: https://annihilationevent.com/

Annihilation Event has no singular origin, but many strands and streams. 

This is a project about copies, prints, scans, derivations, reconstructions, casts, and virtual models.

Here an idea of the contemporary might be bringing different times into relation with one another through the agency of a Neolithic chalk lump, a Renaissance portolan chart, the collective assembly of a digital idol and the live destruction of an image sensor.

In particle physics, an annihilation event occurs when a subatomic particle collides with its respective antiparticle to produce other particles. A particle collision is a useful metaphor for the unruly and generative process of transdiciplinary exchange, of bringing disparate disciplines and generations into contact.

Annihilation Event invited a contrary group of artists, archivists, archaeologists, historians, technical experts and theorists from all over Europe to bring their objects, machines, speculative processes and performances into constellation. Annihilation Event took place in the Lethaby Gallery at Central Saint Martins in March 2017.

In the lead up to this students and graduates worked in research groups on a prototype event. In January 2017 at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern we ran public workshops and demonstrated processes including casting, photogrammetry, reflectance transformation imaging and virtual reality applications.