Cooper Jacobus

A magnetic film divided into tiny arrow-shaped cells behaves like a crowd in a square. While it's cold, all arrows point in the same direction — perfect order. Heat the film, and the arrows start darting around like pedestrians who have lost their purpose. Somewhere between these extremes, there is a moment when the system stops being uniform but hasn't yet dissolved into random noise.

In a dark room, music plays. Powder is scattered on the floor — fine, almost invisible. Low frequencies make it gather into intricate patterns: filaments, clumps, voids. In much the same way, gravity over billions of years weaves galaxies into the cosmic web — except here, attraction does the work instead of sound waves.