We Are Supernova

What can only be known by a body? And what happens to that knowledge when instruments can only detect what they already expect to find?
We Are Supernova is a practice-led MSCA postdoctoral project by Anne Haaning at Goldsmiths, developing an intermaterial method tracing silica from cosmic origins to the silicon chip. Its findings take the form of a lecture performance in which an essay is read out loud while screen-capture records her navigating research repositories, enacting rather than illustrating the research.
The project organises itself around three material investigations. First, seeing patterns in noise: before any pattern can be detected, the world must be reduced to data, stripped of embodied and situated knowledge as a prerequisite. AI diffusion models, the Vera Rubin Observatory, and NASA's cosmic dust collection share this logic, but what kind of knowledge goes undetected at such scales of information? Second, machine vision: the drone operates within a kill box; it must define its target before it can see. SETI listens only for signals it already knows. As ambitions to colonise space intensify, is the Vera Rubin Observatory's survey of the sky so different, a kill box aimed at the universe? Third, supernova/silica/silicon: tracing silica from stellar nucleosynthesis to semiconductor reveals a single continuous material history. Silica was transforming from supernova to sand to chip long before Silicon Valley turned that transformation into a product. Whatever computation achieves, the universe remains indifferent.
Across all three is a lineage connecting Carl Sagan, the Whole Earth Catalog, and Silicon Valley accelerationism, cosmic curiosity progressively narrowed into extractivist projection. The intermaterial method refuses that narrowing, a form of situated knowledge that keeps body and material in relation against the homogenising pressures of algorithmic and platform-driven knowledge production.