• Towards the Essence of Matter: (solo show) Tent Gallery, Edinburgh 2018
Beards final project for the ECA Degree Show 2018 ‘Towards the Essence of Matter’ is the latest in a series of artistic investigations into various aspects our vibrant materiality – and an attempt at not simply representing the nature of reality at the finest granular scale but (as with the so called “redox reaction” central to the etching process (which sees an exchange of electrons from copper sulphate and zinc) it is an engagement with materiality at the quantum level.
The first of three works is a re-presentation of the so called ‘Standard model’ – a kind of pictographic periodic table of each of the seventeen fundamental quantum particles that (as far as we know) make up everything of substance in our universe (aside from gravity and dark matter).
Inspired by old scientific ‘magic lantern’ slides, the boxes display a series of Pictographs (pictures which resemble what they signify) ‘painted’ in photons. By speaking the names of the particles into a custom-made oscilloscope, energy from sound vibrations oscillate a laser beam via a mirrored membrane resulting in a signature unique to each particle name. These so called lisajous curves were then photographed with a long exposure and screen-printed onto seventeen glass plates.
The set of lacquered light-boxes reference Max plank’s “black box” thought experiment (which gave rise to the first quantum theory and lead Albert Einsteine to devise the first quantum-mechanical equations that proved the strange wave-particle duality of light) and in a sense creates a new logographical system of writing for that which is inaccessible though our five senses “It is in language alone that like knows like” (Adorno 1975) One is reminded of the wonderful ‘Landmarks’ by Robert Mcfarlane – the lyrical and eloquent love letter to language In which he explains how when we loose the words to describe something we often loose the ability to perceive it… “words act as compasses; place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being and to sing ones being back into it” (Macfarlane 2015).
By literally inspiring or breathing life into these particle names Russell succeeds in somehow reanimating or transmuting the words from nouns that are little more than arbitrary, albeit useful short-hand for a set of physical properties into living verbs that manifest as vibrant evocative images with the power to illuminate the imagination by pointing to the perpetual happening which is the very essence of matter – and if “physical appearance, activities and meanings are the raw materials of the identity of places…” (Relph 1976) perhaps each of these images represent not just a quantum particle-field existing in abstract space but a discrete fundamental unit or quanta of place?
The second piece is based on a Victorian animation device known as a Praxinoscope or “action viewer”. It was a invented in France around the time that Max Plank and Albert Einstein first theorised that light was made up of fundamental particles or ‘Photons’ that “fall on us like a gentle hail shower” (Rovelli 2016) ushering in a new paradigm of particle physics known as Quantum Field Theory
The Praxinoscope was the successor to the zoetrope but instead of a strip of images held inside a vertical drum the pictures sit on a horizontal plane . Beard has built this device using wood from various pieces of Victorian furniture and created three interchangeable image plates.
The images etched into zinc plates are representations of fundamental particles. Each plate corresponds to a different particle and starts with an atomic (‘Indivisible’) point that splits into orbital-like – lisajous curves before returning to the single point. Divided into twelve segments each plate references clock time – but instead of numbers positioned around the periphery the characters emerge from the center in a spiral – pointing to the scientific truth that Time is an emergent property -useful to measure movement or change between two or more variables but no longer useful to think of as some kind of Newtonian “cosmic cloak” under which we all sit (Rovelli 2016)
Using the same oscilloscope to give a physical form to the particle names each image can be read as a phonetic unit of the word. Unlike logograms (used by quarter of the worlds population) – these don’t have word meanings but represent sounds – (as in phonetic or orthographical writing like Korean Hangul) – when phonograms are combined they create multi syllabic meaning and phrases.
When the praxinoscope is spun the phonograms appear in the mirrors to meld into one animated pictograph which resembles, signifies and represents a quantum field.
This project continues In the tradition of the pioneering photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge who saw himself as an explorer using art and photography “in the spirit of scientific enquiry”.(brittanica.com) using his ‘Zoopraxiscope’ and animated sequence of a galloping horse he was credited with creating the first moving images to allow viewers to access a keener understanding of aspects of physical reality beyond the threshold of human perception.
By manifesting works of art, that illustrates, represents or even transcends scientific or mathematical worldview is an iterative process. Much like our understanding of ecology that evolved from ideas of linear succession to a more dynamical moving tapestry “a patchwork quilt of living things, changing continually through time and space… the stitches in that quilt never hold for long” (Worster 1989)” We are in a state of perpetual becoming, of creating and recreating our understanding of the world and it is the task of poets, artists & philosophers to “cease being the handmaidens of science” (Rovelli 2018) but to trust in the power of poetics, creativity and intuition and strive for epistemological and inspirational symbiosis. In the words of Mauro Durato “radical change in our physical worldview is not just due to the invention of a mathematical formalism or to new empirical information coming from novel experiments, but it also implies a thorough modification of the fundamental concepts with which we interpret the world of our experience”. (Dorato 2016)
The third and final piece is a visual timeline of the discoveries of subatomic particles presented as an abstract film projected at the end of a blacked out tunnel in to which the viewer is invited to peer.
Beginning with a single point of light of the ancient Greek atomistic world view – Beard “en-chants” the particles (Abram 2012) – using the words to split the atomic point of light into different orbits “Strange Quarks” and “Higgs Bosons”… the sound-waves oscillate a beam of photons via a mirrored membrane resulting in abstract patterns resembling particle-field orbitals which are recorded in ultra slow motion and played back at speeds corresponding to the year of their discovery.
New orbitals appear layering of one on top of the other, building in complexity creating a swarm of particles that appear to act and interact like a field and display a strange symmetrical quality. The unsettling low-frequency echoes are infact ultra high-speed recordings of the seventeen fundamental particles being spoken in the order in which they were identified. The howling cavernous noises are coupled with the surround-sound of a crackling fire coming from behind the viewer in a clear reference to ‘Plato’s Cave’ – a reminder that our understanding of the nature of matter and the fundamental constituents of “reality” is always partial and in a state of constant flux . While we may be calling back into the cave to Lucretius and the natural philosophers of ancient Greece telling them of quarks and electrons – in a sense we are still in the cave – straining to hear the echoes of our future-selves calling back to us perhaps sharing their secrets of ‘dark matter’ and maybe even the quantum-granular nature of spacetime.
The oscilloscope membrane itself could be seen as a metaphor for the scientific endeavour – like the permeable membrane that exists between the ideal platonic noumena – and the phenomenal “real world” of things. Perhaps it is the responsibility of the artists, scientists and shamans the “boundary crawlers” (Bennett 2001) to straddle this liminal terrain in order to reach into in the world of visions, intuitions and imaginations – and to return bearing gifts.