Against the darkened Kravis Studio at MoMA, a network of taut wires spans the space on a diagonal, evoking the strings of an abstract, celestial instrument — less a web than a spatial tuning device. These cords hum with latent energy, responsive to even the subtlest vibrations of light and sound. Not merely structural, they activate the room as a charged field of potential. “The Ocean of One’s Pause,” Rosa Barba’s latest project, gathers twelve sculptural and cinematic works spanning fifteen years of her practice, transforming the gallery into a site of intersensorial orchestration: at once instrument, observatory, and signal chamber.
Barba reconfigures cinema as a speculative interface — a conductive ecology where light, sound, material, and language perform resonant relations. Her installations resist narrative closure and medium-specific fixity, composing instead a field of dispersed intelligences. The immersive environment invites viewers to attune to shifting frequencies across sensory thresholds. Barba’s cinema is not a fixed system but a durational, recursive, and operative mode of inquiry in flux.
At the core of this experimental ecology is Charge (2025), a newly commissioned 35mm film projected in recursive intervals onto a central screen. Shot at physics-inflected sites including the Nançay Radio Observatory in France, Charge oscillates between planetary scale and particulate abstraction. Satellite dishes, antennae, and scaffolds flicker and dissolve amid equations, diagrams, and spectral notations. The visual montage is interwoven with a sonic composition of cello, percussion, field recordings, and the scrape of pendulum strings, forming a fugue of transmission and suspension. The film unfolds in the logic of the time-image, as Deleuze defined it: nonlinear, durational, open-ended. Perception detaches from action, opening onto speculative thought. Vision becomes just one node in a field of intermedial drift.
In Wirepiece (2022) and its evolving variations, a loop of 16mm film acts as both bow and player. Threaded through a tilted projector, the celluloid grazes a snare drum string suspended floor to ceiling. Each tinted frame pulses against the walls, the string releasing a silvery flutter. The space quivers, performing as much as it projects. Film here is no longer inert — it is vibratory, sonorous, live. Signals traverse air, architecture, and body, collapsing the conventional boundaries between medium and message.
Throughout the show, individual works function as autopoietic modules — each generating its own internal logics of motion, material, and attention. Conductor (2014) vibrates subtly in place, its silicone membrane pulsing like a cellular wall; One Way Out (2009) loops film through a ventilator tube, its flicker synchronized with the whirring suction. Sensible Suns (2025), Composition in Field (2022), and Off Splintered Time (2021) unfold their own tempos: repetitions, oscillations, wave-like rhythms — coexisting in asynchronous counterpoint. Barba’s spatial choreography is polyphonic, an entangled matrix where distinct temporalities coexist, occasionally aligning in moments of frictional harmony.
Language, too, enters this field of flux. In As Fixed in Flux (2025), the phrase “Light has made the circuit of the universe” is engraved on a loop of film and set in constant motion, altering the viewer’s grasp of the phrase through its rhythmic repetition. Composition in Field (2022) borrows from Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” attuning poetic breath to mechanical rhythm. Text becomes sculptural: legible only from certain vantages, its fragments are printed on film, layered but discernible, projected onto Plexiglas. These inscriptions overlap in a metered rhythm, producing a stratified field of meaning. Language here behaves as signal — looped, refracted, and delayed across sculptural and temporal axes.
A live performance program expands “The Ocean of One’s Pause” into the realm of activated cinema. Conceived as an “exploded poem,” the series inverts the conventional hierarchy of film’s components: sound takes the lead, initiating a live interplay of voice, rhythm, light, and projection. In each activation, Barba performs alongside percussionist Chad Taylor and vocalist Alicia Hall Moran, animating the installation as a generative system.
Performance fractures the system open. During scheduled activations, Moran’s voice and Taylor’s percussion punctuate the space, triggering mechanical shutters and refracting beams of light. Barba plays not only the cello but the space itself — projecting through suspended cellophane sheets that prism the light into kaleidoscopic bloom. In these charged intervals, the gallery becomes a living score of light, vibration, and feedback in provisional accord, attuned to, improvisation.
“The Ocean of One’s Pause” does not illustrate scientific phenomena — it enacts their speculative properties. Barba’s cinema recalibrates our awareness, folding space, time, and matter into a mutable continuum. Here, knowledge does not reside in the image or text, but emerges through the modulation of signal and attention. Cinema becomes an instrument of attunement and a physics of perception. Tuned to an ocean of frequencies, her work never truly pauses. It conducts.
