The Roman philosopher Lucretius called it clinamen — the random swerve of atoms that makes collision, and therefore everything, possible. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot borrowed the word for his most celebrated installation. Inside the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the concept becomes audible.

Boursier-Mougenot was trained as a musician before turning to contemporary conceptual art, and that dual formation remains fundamental to his practice. He does not so much compose as orchestrate the conditions from which a work emerges. In Clinamen, the performers are the bowls, the water, the current, and the surrounding architecture, each participating in a choreography governed by chance and physical law. Sound arises through their encounter: the bowls drift as the water moves, carried by a current so subtle as to verge on invisibility. What Artforum describes as "an almost sacred encounter with art and nature" is also, quietly, a lesson in how the world composes itself.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot represented France at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. His practice — which includes from here to ear, a walk-in aviary where live zebra finches land on amplified electric guitars and generate spontaneous sonic compositions, and offroad, in which three autonomous grand pianos move slowly across a gallery floor — consistently returns to the same question across different plots and permutations: what happens when you withdraw the composer from the composition, and let the world make its own music?