In 1980, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham received a letter containing a loose piece of chalk. The letter was from a former student, who explained that the chalk had been used by Albert Einstein during his visit to the university on 6 June 1930. Einstein had written equations on a blackboard during his visit, signing the corner once he had finished. This unique blackboard is now preserved at the university. Nearly a century after Einstein’s visit, Lakeside Arts is presenting Cosmic Titans: Art, Science and the Quantum Universe, an exhibition featuring newly commissioned artworks by nine artists. Jo Herlihy reviews...
Lakeside Arts presents Cosmic Titans: Art, Science and the Quantum Universe - a multi-media exploration of how we can attempt to understand aspects of the universe that are beyond the comprehension of our five senses.
Four years in the making, and coinciding with 100 years of quantum mechanics, the exhibition was incubated in UoN's Arts Lab and curated by Professor Silke Weinfurtner, School of Mathematical Sciences and Research Fellow Dr Ulrike Kuchner, Faculty of Science. They enlisted the talents of their scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers to work with nine artists using immersive installation, sculpture, sound, photography and words, finding different ways of representing the quantum universe. The exhibition aims to give expression to the excitement and poetry of cutting-edge scientific discovery.
The exhibition’s title Cosmic Titans derives from the name given to gigantic galaxies, such as Hyperion: recently discovered in 2018. This Titan has a mass more than one million billion times that of the Sun and was created just two billion years after the Big Bang!
The ripples of the explosion of space shimmers in moonlight colour, showing the chaotic beauty of the loops and waves of the Cosmic Inflation reaction
The collaborative art pieces bring our attention to such mind-bending phenomena and the very difficult and complex ideas scientists are currently grappling with. The artworks allow us to ‘see’ something of these concepts in ways our five sense can’t. They conjure up different representations of the hidden universe helping us consider questions in new ways - how would we see perceive the world if we experienced it through the lens of quantum physics? If particles can be in two places at once, how does this alter our idea of choice and decision-making? And how does the collaboration of artists and scientists assist the work of the other?
Such collaborations have been tried in the past. For example, in developing his theories around light, Isaac Newton used his practical experience of painting and worked alongside artists gaining new insights in colour through experimentation. This collaboration advanced the understanding of both colour and light faster than was being achieved by scientists working alone. The Cosmic Titans exhibition provides a case study for more collaborations, illustrating the richness of what can be achieved.
Superdecision by Matthew Woodham metaphorically illustrates choice and ambiguity in decision-making. Using a beautiful scientific instrument that he created, Woodham demonstrates how light appears at a sub-atomic level when observed as either wave or particle form. His experiment shows us how a coin flipped within different conditions reveals all the possible trajectories at once rather than one or the other that we normally see. Whilst he illuminates the complexity of our choices, he also illustrates that we retain power in deciding to move forward.
The ability of science to also speak poetically and aesthetically to us is illustrated directly with the work of Monica LoCascio and Daniela Brill Estrada. They literally stripped out the technical terms from a difficult scientific text called Dynamic of Dark Energy revealing rich poetic and metaphorical language not even the scientists were aware of. They highlight how emphasising such language could strengthen the bridge between scientists and the wider world.
As well as helping us make sense of complex ideas, another challenge for the artists is their ability to create pieces that work aesthetically, which, given the complexity of the ideas being conveyed, is no mean feat. A few of the pieces illustrate how beautiful this fusion of art and science can be.
Grappling with the cosmic dance that occurs when two black holes converge, a phenomenon known as Ringdown, Conrad Shawcross’s kinetic structure plays out the dramatic art of this collision using two spinning bronze bells circling within a geodesic honeycombed dome. Sensors capturing the orbiting movement adds another lens via an adjacent screen. The work possesses all the tension of a fear-inducing gravitational fairground ride, holding you in awe as you ‘see’ the movement, light and sound of this structure in its unfolding movement.
The Early Universe by Alistair McClymont is another example. This is a transfixing construction where “…the patterns of waves on the surface of vibrated water are used to conjecture the dynamics of the universe in the split seconds after the big bang”. The ripples of the explosion of space shimmers in moonlight colour, showing the chaotic beauty of the loops and waves of the Cosmic Inflation reaction. Installed within a dark and tranquil space, you are a spectator hovering over this, long-since passed, great spectacle.
This collaboration clearly demonstrates how a multi-disciplinary and creative approach can help take us all on this journey of discovery into the universe in its complex levels. Another question we then might ask is whether an absorption of these concepts into our imagination provides a bridge back to ourselves, helping us to reconceive and remould an understanding of ourselves within the expanding universe(s)? The shifting, expanding, multi-dimensional and relative quantum world contrasts with our mortal lives and, despite the contingency Woodham illustrates, we are bounded by time, bracketed by birth and death. What new metaphors and allegories are we or will we create as a response?
Cosmic Titans draws on the Ancient Greek myths that gave us characters like Prometheus and Icarus. Are our imaginations busy manufacturing multitudes of Icarus-like characters, falling to the ground, full of hubris due to excessive excitement of our ambitions flying to close to the sun? And from this view of excessive pride, are we only deserving of being viewed in our relative smallness; being seen from infinity’s perspective, drawing from a few of the words imprinted on one of the copper wall panels?
And what about vengeance. Nemesis, was a god re-balancing order -but do we imagine more of a vengeful god emerging?
Shawcross’s Ringdown draws on TS Elliots poem, The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Or do we envisage our human condition in a new Promethean form. In Prometheus Bound, a play by Aeschylus (Circa 450 BCE), this titan stands in for Man in two ways – suffering unfair punishment for eternity for daring to challenge the mighty god Zeus and, second, as the giver of our human gifts and imagination allowing us to survive and flourish in a hostile and dangerous world. We dared to imagine “…every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus”. We transformed from being witless to being endowed with reason – to see, to build, to mine, to anticipate, to interpret, to invent, to create language and the arts. Prometheus gave us the talents to both survive but also to make the earth beautiful.
Find out more at https://www.lakesidearts.org.uk/exhibition/cosmictitans/
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