- Artist
- Alan Bogana
- Year
- 2020
- Medium
- Video 10"
Ionize, Ionize! is a speculative and fictional video essay that investigates the materiality of scintillators
Alan Bogana’s artistic practice focuses on exploring the interactions within a vast array of natural phenomena. His works apply different media to make us observers of the rhythms and dynamics of ephemeral phenomena, particularly those related to light, minerals, fluids, and crystals.
In Ionize, Ionize!, Bogana focuses on the materiality of scintillators–materials that convert energy lost by ionising radiation into pulses of light. These active materials play a crucial role in physics, particularly in particle detectors, and have applications in medicine, such as cancer therapy.
For this visually striking and fictional video essay, Bogana filmed in a scintillation detector factory in Utrecht, where he examined the unique properties of these materials. Through this work, he reflects on the invisible signals in nature and how they exist without us noticing. He encourages us to consider the surrounding non-human phenomena that have become perceptible thanks to experimental technologies and research materials, as well as how curiosity shapes human knowledge.
