the hidden world of your home

I’ve been enthralled with a book that my mother picked up in a second-hand shop a few weeks ago, called The Secret House: The hidden world of your home (David Bodanis, 1986). It’s a description of invisible forces and events which occur in a house, written from the perspective of a day in the life of a “typical” British couple, in the 80’s.

It describes all sorts of events which occur around us, but of which we have no idea. Like the dust, pollen and a lot of nastier particles, which are constantly trapped in a kind of micro cyclone surrounding our bodies. They rise up from a partial vacuum just above the ground at our ankles on streams of hot air, due to nothing more than the heat we generate ourselves. Or, the fact that wind, rather than just blowing, is likely to be air that is being sucked in by a vacuum, caused by another section of air somewhere else, which has larger gaps between its particles.

I’m fascinated by the description of what happens to your house when there is a storm: water molecules in the air get denser in the proximity of storm clouds, turning to ice. So the air becomes heavier and sinks in a vertical wind, which bounces outwards when it hits the ground. Inside this column of air is enough of a vacuum to make your house swell when it is caught underneath. The walls and windows bend outwards, and the air trapped inside is sucked up and tries to escape. If the storm is really strong, and all the windows and doors are shut tight, the air will force against the walls, eventually (in a worst case scenario) swelling under the suction to the point at which the house explodes and the roof flies off! On a much smaller scale, even a footstep triggers vibrations that extend outwards, causing bricks to shrink and the whole house to compress. Some of the shock quivers over the floor, causing papers and even furniture to lift, of course on a scale imperceptible to us.

And there are so many other interesting facts and anecdotes; like the electrostatic field that surrounds any synthetic garment we wear, sucking in particles from the air and our skin. The same kind of field hovers above the carpet we walk across (leaving footprints visible as fluorescent green with the right viewing equipment). And the small particles of all sorts of things (pollen, fungus spores, dead dust mites and their faeces, skin flakes, sulphur, bacteria, various chemical compounds, etc., etc.) which travel through the air, between inside and out, propelled in different directions by various force fields or vacuums or currents... I could go on!



It’s fascinating because it uncovers a whole world beyond the limits of our senses, but which is in such close proximity to our daily lives. It highlights how little we actually perceive of our surroundings and how limited the bubble we actually live in is. But also, it’s interesting the way it draws on all this technology that humans have developed in order to extend the limits of our senses, especially vision. From microscopes to infrared photography and thermograms (heat sensing imaging) to using polarised light and the Schlieren technique, which makes different air speeds visible as multicoloured strands. (And all this is from the 80’s! No doubt we have discovered a myriad more sophisticated techniques for imaging the unseen.)



I think humans have this innate (pioneering?) curiosity to extend their fields of perception, to discover the unknown, to keep pushing at the limits of their bubbles. I’m interested in the unknown and invisible at both micro and macro levels, from black holes and possible universes beyond ours, to the events which occur on a nano level, but I think that the most interesting thing is how much is going on around us within the perimeter of our daily lives that isn’t perceived. There seems to be this huge field around us of which we can only see a fraction, but which nevertheless affects us in some way. So we continually invent devices that extend our senses or perception, in order to explore this invisible world. Maybe art could be classed in the same category, a sense-extending device, although perhaps in a more philosophical than practical way?

I want to think further about the relationship between art (as a primarily visual medium) and the invisible, but more on that soon.

(the pictures are of: 1. Dust, consisting of grit from bricks and concrete, fibers from clothes or other fabric, and a cat flea egg. 2. The book. 3. Comet dust, which has fallen from outer space within a raindrop. 4. Dust mites in a vacuum cleaner bag. 5. A sneeze, photographed using the Schleiren technique, which makes airwaves of different speeds visible. 6. Fibers from a synthetic shirt which create an electrostatic field as the wearer shifts and moves.)