Arts at CERN

The film outlines the coming into form of a reality in which the ground or base—like the ground of a painting or the physical ground that human existence has always been pulled toward by gravity—becomes undefined

The material in the film was produced by the artist during residencies at CERN in 2018 and 2019, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and stays in Los Angeles and Oslo.

The lower half of Ground’s main motif sets digitally manipulated footage of the sprawl of Los Angeles, a place defined by the pace of its traffic and the hustle and bustle of human activity. This is set against a skyscape filmed at CERN, in which a physicist explains the discovery and their current research of charge-parity violation

Through the use of effects, his corporeal body has been reduced to frequencies, lines, and grids. His voice resonates with humanity, “My life has been dedicated to…”, before Thornton completes the sentence off camera, “…the decay.” While he is referring to specific scientific processes, the film seems to imply another process of decay: the decay or loosening of indexical relationships through which reality has historically been consolidated. The lines that suggest his form shudder and thicken as he moves, creating an image space oscillating elastically between depth and surface at any given time.

Although his research in particle physics might seem inaccessible, Thornton was interested in conveying the scientist’s mode of address. As recurrent in many of Thorton’s works, speech becomes a dominant force that appears to animate the video’s abstracted visual universe.