Black space Experiment
I rented the black space at college but it was a bit of a disaster. When I got in I found the room was full of wood and left about a metre square to work in. Also there was light coming in from the white space next door which I couldn't cover up without getting a ladder. To cap it all, I couldn't collect the digital projector I had rented because I had missed the 10- 10.30 collecting slot.
I went ahead anyway, using a white plinth as a backdrop, and a small plank to hang my acetate planets off.
I had made them by cutting two circles of acetate and putting ink and glue between them. Putting little patches of glue made more interesting patterns of bubbles. I tried to place the different inks to emphasise the circle shape, with a shadow on one side to suggest a curve.
I glued the planets to fishing wire and tied them up. I had wanted to use different projections on them but instead had to use my phone's torch light. It still worked alright.
Here are some of my favourites that I have played around with on photoshop.

What I really learnt from this experiment was how well light shines through glue, it really makes some lovely effects. I also learnt that 2D acetate circles are very hard to position where you want them because they often spin and end up facing the wrong way.

More ideas
I have two new ideas that I'm hoping to do over the next week.
One is based on this image that I got from astronomy magazine, which shows the sequence of an eclipse in twelve pictures. I haven't scanned it in but here is a similar image.

My idea is to somehow make this 3D with mounted bulbs and black hanging spheres. It would be about positions in space - the onlooker and the cosmic bodies involved, precision, and light.
On the subject of eclipses, I made this in about 10 minutes, using a little light a white sheet and a plate. I think they make an effective eclipse.

My second idea is this..

I already have the sheet of glass and basically just need to wait for a clear night over the next few days to give it a go. I can move the planets around in orbital shapes and put the photos together to make an animation. hopefully the stars behind will be visible as well.

I'm also pondering the idea of using circular mirrors. I want to try projecting images onto a circular mirror and maybe bouncing it off a few others.. Perhaps the image could hit the viewer dead on? Maybe coloured spheres could move in orbit, interrupting and distorting the light beam?
I've wanted to use circles and motors in my work before and never got round to it. I need to try and step out of my comfort zone and use some technicians.

I think my work is going through the experimental phase - I actually don't want any more concepts now, I need to try out lots of different materials and setups and one of them will make sense with one of the concepts. :)

I've done a little more research on Dan Goods and Liliane Lijn.
I found this website through Dan Goods which has some more artists interested in space, so that's useful
I also found a lot of relevant things in Lijn's book of works 1959-80.

James Whitney was "convinced that the graphs and photos in Scientific American were a natural non-objective art form dealing with the same concepts as Jung or Krishnamurti."

I was really excited to see that Liliane Lijn was influenced by Richard Feynman because I've just finished reading his autobiography, 'Surely you're joking Mr Feynman' and am currently reading his second book 'What Do You Care What Other People Think?'. I think he's one of my favourite people to have ever lived.

"Lijn was drawn to the scientist Richard P. Feynman's visualisations of physics in the sixties and seventies. Feynman was at the forefront of the development of post-war quantum mechanics and Lijn was particularly fascinated by his vision of the supremacy of particles, with the photon: the most elementary particle of light, as the key element in the electro-magnetic field; that conjunction of magnetism, electricity and light.
He had addressed himself to overcoming the abstracted formalisations of a quantum physicist's "impossibility of visualisation". How was one to perceive the atom or the electron in the act of emitting light? What mental picture could guide the scientist?
Lijn, aided by her assiduous reading of books and articles about physics, had reached what could be thought of as a quantum theory of art and culture.
This was based on what Feynman called 'the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms: little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another" The illustrations for Feynman's lectures showed a pictorial idea of quantum physics particles in motion, yet gathered together in clusters and arrays.
These suggest Lijn's circled and dotted notation of particle structures in process in her graphic work through the sixties and seventies. Matter, Feynman observed, allocated structures and positions to particles so "that in a solid the atoms are arranged in some kind of array, called a crystalline array"
But movement, Feynman's 'jiggle-jiggle-jiggle', was key to Lijn's art and was identified by her as that universal form - electrical energy incarnated as
photons: "There is radiant energy, the energy of light, which we know is a form of electrical energy because light can be represented as wigglings in the electromagnetic field."

SO, interesting to know that Lijn had similar interests to me as well as a visual style that I am drawn to.

On a vaguely related note, the iphone game Osmos has been inspiring me. Which is good because even when I'm wasting time playing games on my phone its reminding me of art.

Its a beautiful game. They describe it as being relaxing but I find it terrifying at times when you're getting eaten by huge pulsating orbs. Its 'physics based' which means that momentum is affected by size and so on.

Context / Site / Audience
I'm really enjoying my elective at the moment. It is mostly about sculpture which is something I am fairly unfamiliar with, and is dealing with stuff that makes my head hurt. I am enjoying forcing myself to understand the stuff in the readings.
We have to make a group piece in a few weeks, based around College, like something that college is missing. I like the idea of making some stairs that leads up over the roof with a signpost reading 'stairway to your glittering career'
I think its supposed to relate to sculpture / not sculpture or architecture / not architecture... That's not as vague as it looks, but I don't think I am at the stage where I can even explain what I mean by that yet!
We also have to make our own piece of work ( I think) and I'm really excited about the idea of making something impractical, like the sunflower seeds at the turbine hall piece - designed to walk over, but now we all have to stand behind a little fence to look at it. Like I could make a piece inside a viewing box, then put it up a ladder so that health and safety meant noone could go up there. They'd have to take my word for it what the art was like.

I am making a little film at the moment but I'm going to explain that properly when it's finished. Its nothing to do with college work, I just cant help myself.

I'm feeling really frustrated about not making anything solid with my ideas. I'll get on it.

atchoo

This week I haven't been as productive as I would have liked due to a highly irritating cold. I'm still recovering, but that might be more to do with the various celebrations I've attended this weekend. I tried out the acetate idea, using little layers of circles to create a sphere.

It sort of worked but it was a lot of effort for such a little thing, and it got all fluffy because my fingers got gluey. I noted that the way the glue spreads as you squeeze it between acetate is quite interesting, I'm sure I can still find something to do using glue and ink and acetate. I couldn't hang it on fishing wire without waiting for it to dry and using a pin, and by then I'd lost it somewhere, so I've left it.
I did however have quite a successful play with the OHP. here are some smaller images of the results, but I've created an album on my photobucket for higher quality images. They will always be found HERE

I had a go with them on photoshop and made a few experiments using 'trace contours'. I'm quite pleased with these two:

I went to a fantastic exhibition on friday, James Turrell at the Gagosian Gallery. I saw it on timeout and realised how relevant it was so after a brief trip to see the Tate's sunflower seeds I popped to Kings Cross and braved the tourists to find the gallery.
Aside from the 2D work there were three main pieces. The first was what appeared to be a projected rectangle of light with a bench to watch it from. The colours morphed slowly, usually with a different shade glowing in the centre. I was completely mesmerised for about 5 minutes and must have looked a little odd. What was going on in front of my eyes was magic. The room around the piece became darker and it seemed to grow towards me with dark shadows around its edges. Some of the colours burned out my eyes and changed the way I saw the next colour, so that I had no idea what I was actually looking at any more. It felt like my eyes were changing the colours, as though the colour was on the surface of my eye.
I later realised that there was no projector, which meant it was lit from behind. The piece is called 'sustaining light'. Amazing.

The second piece was a metal chamber with a sloped walkway leading to it. Next to it a woman in a lab coat was watching a computer screen. Every 15 minutes a prebooked visitor would lie in the person sized drawer and be slid into the chamber. Through the cracks of the drawer flashing lights can be seen.. Very surreal indeed!
I had no idea about the prebooking but went on the iphone right away and booked myself in for the 11th November. Apparently it is some sort of light show with accompanying sounds that plays around with your senses. I can't wait!
I queued for the third piece for about half an hour. From a distance, there appears to be some steps leading up to a bright projected square of colour on the wall. As you get nearer you realise that people are climbing the steps and disappearing into the square. There is a room beyond a hole in the wall. around ten at a time are allowed in the room, with shoes replaced by plastic socks and belongings left in a pile with the queue.
As I climbed the steps I realised the room had perfectly curved white walls and a floor that sloped down towards a curved rectangular shape. I decided the shape must be another backlit projection. I stood so that I had no points of focus and stared at the shape as the colours morphed into one another. I had the same strange effect on my eyes as with 'sustaining light' except that this time I was completely surrounded by vivid, perfect colour. I spoke to the attendant man and asked what the shape was, and was amazed to discover that it was in fact another space that went five or six metres deep. My eyes had trouble getting around that one.
What was also good was that there was a laminated artist's statement handed around that mentioned how he had been inspired by the way that the light during the day prevents us from seeing the stars, but they are always there - a space influence!
I'm not sure at the moment whether James Turrell's work will influence mine but I am sure that his is the sort of thing that I absolutely love. I hope I can incorporate both light and installation into a piece this term if not the crazy eye effects, I'm not sure I have the budget to go around perfectly sculpting and lighting rooms!
One last thing, here is a random image from a New Scientist article - I can't remember what it was about but its beautiful!

I have my first tutorial tomorrow, I hope I am keeping up.
Over and out!

Research
I have started back at college now so I went to the library the other day and had a look for some artists doing similar things to my ideas. I got VERY excited when I found two excellent ones - Liliane Lijn and Dan Goods.

Liquid Reflections, Liliane Lijn

Cosmic Flares, Liliane Lijn
48” x 47” x 6”
Polymer lenses on Perspex in painted wood frame, lights and motorised switching mechanism.
I began to fabricate framed wall sculptures using thin acrylic sheets as surfaces and incorporating within the frame numerous small spotlights that were programmed to turn on and off sequentially to change the angle of incident light illuminating the surface.
I would like to make cosmic maps. It should be that in the discipline of a drawing there is the same rhythm as that of cosmic forces.
A lens is a point, which could be a photon, an electron, an atom. I wanted to get to the bottom of what a point really was. It appeared to me that as a point might be considered circular, I could make a circle of points which could expand into concentric circles. But, the space in between the succeeding points became greater and greater so that point lines radiated from the central circle. Because of this I realised that each point is connected to its nearest neighbours by some kind of force. A point is in reality a particle of matter and contains the same positive and negative forces as all other matter.

Seeing the unseen, Dan Goods

There are many things that exist right in front of us, yet we do not have the right technologies or mindset to see them. From scientific breakthroughs to successful organizational outcomes, they can all be obscured by something else until someone finds the key to truly see. For scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they are looking to discover earth like planets around other stars. This is extremely difficult because stars are billions of times bigger and brighter than the planets they are looking for. Yet they believe they are right there. Already hundreds of planets have been found, but current technology limits us to finding only the largest of planets. In the coming decades JPL will invent the tools to find them. This installation investigates this concept of seeing what is unseen.
To communicate these ideas I project a movie onto a large wall/surface. At the same time I project a brighter pixelated movie that is reminicent of the sun. This projected light is so bright it washes out the movie from the other projector. The “sunlike” projector is about waist height so that as soon as you walk in front of the light, the persons shadow hits the screen and reveals the video inside their shadow. The more people inside, the more of the video they can see.

An interactive Sound Sculpture, Dan Goods
Myself and four other artists were commissioned to create a new work related to infrared astronomy for the Observe Exhibition at Art Center College of Design. Thank you to Gilad Lotan who did all the technical integration for this project.
When you walk into the space you first see a large clock, and at the same time, hear a bunch of voices. As you enter the space you realize that each of the hours of the clock are different sizes and different distances away. At some point the viewer notices a glowing light that says "talk to me" on it. When the person bends over to talk to it, a microphone senses the movement and records for five seconds. Their voice is recorded, but not played back for a few seconds. The viewer is at first confused, since nothing happens immediately, but after a few seconds thier voice comes out of one of the speakers. After a few more seconds, what they said comes out another speaker. It then comes out in a few minutes, hours, days and even months later. So the room is filled with sounds from different time periods. Some of the sounds are even stretched much like light distorts the older it is.
This work was inpired by the fact that when we look at the stars, we do not see them as they are at this moment, but as they were in the past. Stars are vastly different distances away, and therefore different times away. The light from the closest stars can take four years to get here, while other stars can take millions and even billions of years to reach us. So we really see a sky that is a patchwork of history.

When I saw this I got really excited, as someone else has used the 'cosmic spheres of time' idea before. I hope this will be a big influence in my work.

One of the new discoveries I made from this research was Aerogel. It is what NASA use to collect space dust, and it is made of 99.98% air. Here is Lilian Lijn's work that uses aerogel, and its amazing what happens when you shine light throught it.

Heavenly Fragments, 2008
295 x 65 x 65 cm
Aerogel Fragments of cone and disc on grey mirror in Perspex case, perlescent metallic coated square column housing dvd player, projector
Video: Visions of the East, 50’ looped dvd
A disc and a cone of aerogel have broken into fragments. Each installation is an attempt at renewal but can only represent a fragmented memory, a ruin. The video projected onto this installation, Visions of the East, is a compilation of images -memories from my travels in Southern India in 2003.


Solid Smoke, Dan Goods

I'm guessing its not something I will be able to get hold of easily..

Ideas
I think I am leaning towards using the 'spheres of time' idea, especially having found a way that it has been used in installation. When I saw the aerogel work I wondered if there was a way that I could make something similar with materials to hand.
The idea I have at the moment is to layer lots of circles of acetate to make spheres. I could paint each layer with ink, and possibly fade to different colours in different areas of the spehere. I have bought the acetate and located a compass so I'll be trying that out this week.
I also have an old fashioned fishing buouy made of glass which is very similar to something from Lijn's work, which I will be experimenting with alongside the OHP and with photography.

Science is Vital
On Saturday I went to the Science is Vital rally outside the HM treasury in Westminster. I heard about it from the various scientists that I follow on twitter, here is a link to the website
I do urge anyone reading this in time to sign the petition as there are already over 20,000 signatures despite it only being started 2 weeks ago! The rally was great, I haven't been to a protest before and I really enjoyed the atmosphere and the feeling of being a part of something. I was a little disappointed with the placards, they had all been printed straight from the site - but a few had been painted and were a little more unusual, like the ones from the Oxford astronomers. The talks were really inspiring and persuaded me even more, as though I needed it!

Galaxy Zoo

I found a brilliant website the other day where you classify images from space to help the people mapping the skies. I signed up and had a go at classifying potential supernovae and different types of galaxy. You can also track your own work and see what happens to the images you think are a bit fishy.

Off now as Holly needs to trace pupating Monarch Butterflies from my screen! More soon!

Its been a strange month, I have moved to Morden (I tell people its Wimbledon) in our 5 bedroom student house slash Granny Mansion so have been somewhat preoccupied with doing grown up things rather than artistic thoughts. There also is a crippling lack of wireless internet and therefore my iphone and 3G dongle have been getting a lot of usage. It also means I have had even more than the usual backlog of witterings to blog about...

BESTIVAL
From the 10th to the 13th of September I went to Bestival on the Isle of Wight. Aside from the music and all the other amazing things that I saw there were a variety of visual delights on offer.

The animations on the screens were more than just accompanying pretty patterns, Roxy Music had live footage interspersed with Kandinsky paintings!

The last video is of the animation from the Flaming Lips performance...

Colourscape Music Festival

The festival was held in Clapham Common in September. I found it on the timeout website and assumed it was some highly respectable art installation but it turned out to be full of small children. Nevertheless it was amazing. It is basically a huge inflatable maze of beautifully lit tunnels, with a music performance in the centre.

The coolest part was when my eyes started going crazy with all the different colours they were trying to adjust to. It is also a brilliant place to take photos because everything is so smooth and you get interesting lighting effects depending on where you stand.


Under the Sea

We held an underwater themed party for our housewarming / my birthday. As the conservatory has a glass wall facing the garden we decided to go with an aquarium feel, using the cheapest materials available to create coral, seaweed and fish. Along with the fairy lights and the soundtrack to The Little Mermaid, the overall effect was beautiful.
We had sainsbury’s coral, tesco’s wine box fish with ink and acrylic, and Budgens bags with bin bags for seaweed. There were hanging bubbles made of various findings from Holly’s art box, and a ‘pin the tail on the whale’ made from one particularly large piece of cardboard. I also painted some acetate coral reef style for the OHP over the food table. (I wanted a digital projector to play my aquarium screensaver, alas)
(Unfortunately my phone went awol for the entire party so I couldn’t get any photos, what I have is what I could find or take afterwards. Will update as soon as I can)


College
I’ve got to come up with a piece for a start of term exhibition on Tuesday. The way I see it, a final piece is the last thing on anyone’s mind when they start back at college, but hey. Of course I have plenty of ideas but I haven’t made anything all summer except silly iphone doodles, so I’m either going to present them or cobble together something inspired by my planesphere and constellations. Here are the things I’m currently working with, hoping to turn into something this weekend.

I’ve had a few more project ideas as I continue to be a science geek..

Time and Space
The concept that time passes slower nearer larger objects is something that I’m still trying to get my head around.

If you watch this from roughly 4 minutes in it explains how gravity warps time and that although on Earth we barely detect it, around massive objects time slows down much more.. So time ticks slower near the sun than it does here.
When I was at the recording of BBC4’s infinite monkey cage, Alan Moore joked that he had once written the most implausible piece of fiction...
“I remember in Halo Jones I’ve got a planet of such mass that time was actually being bent – as a function of gravity.” - Moore
“-That’s absolutely correct! And if you wrote that before 1915 you’re a genius!” - Cox
Another time related concept I’m grappling with is that of time dilation. I first heard about it at the Q&A session after the showing of Wonders at Clapham Picture House, and was reeling from it for days – then I heard Carl Sagan talking about the same thing decades earlier, so it is by no means a new idea.

Here Sagan explains how when you travel near to the speed of light, time slows down for you. This means that if you could go fast enough, you could reach distant stars within your own lifetime. But if you wanted to come home, hundreds or thousands of years may have passed. The possibilities of involving this idea in an art project are vast, because you could concentrate on the very small – it is due to atoms that they developed this theory, or the very large as it concerns massive distances, or even possibly the human perspective, the idea of everyone you know being long dead when you return from the stars.

Curved Light

Light trapped on curved surfaces
17 September 2010 by Rachel Courtland, New Scientist
LIGHT, which in everyday experience travels in straight beams, has been trapped on complex curved surfaces. The feat is not just a parlour trick - it could help people visualise how light travels in the curved fabric of space.
According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity is the result of an object's mass deforming space itself, like a bowling ball on a trampoline. To model how light's path would change in space curved by gravity, Ulf Peschel of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and colleagues constructed smooth 3D objects and sent laser beams shooting along their surfaces (Physical Review Letters, in press).
They took advantage of the fact that light bends, or refracts, when it moves from one medium to another. In their simplest experiment, they shot laser light at the edge of a solid glass sphere. The angle of the beam was chosen so that the light - initially travelling in air - would be bent just enough when it entered the glass that it would keep reflecting off the inside surface of the sphere, and so travel along it. When the light inside the sphere reflected off its inner surface, some was also transmitted through the glass, creating a glowing ring on the outside surface.
The team also constructed an object shaped like two trumpet bells stuck end to end - called a hyperbolic surface. The object was made out of aluminium and then coated with oil. Light sent into the oil layer was confined there, bouncing between the metal and air boundaries. The beam spread out ever more quickly, generating a trumpet-shaped glow.
For the light to be trapped in two dimensions, the object's surface needed to be smooth enough to cleanly reflect most of the light into the oil layer rather than scattering it at all angles. That required diamond polishing machines that have only become available in the last 10 years or so, Peschel says.
The experiments help visualise how light travels in space warped by gravity. The sphere, for instance, represents how space is bent around a star or other mass - light passing through this warped space bends in an effect called gravitational lensing. The hyperbolic surface, which has so-called negative curvature because its surface curves up and down at the same time, like a saddle, just might represent the shape of the universe.
"It's a beautiful fundamental experiment," says Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews in the UK, who was not involved in the work. "It's just fun, good physics."

The idea of the sphere attracting light interests me, because it can be beautiful while also relating to a complicated scientific discovery.
My idea for this would involve glass spheres, possibly hanging by fishing wire, and I’d like to test different lights on them. I know that it would definitely be a good starting point for some interesting photography but not sure where it would lead on from there.

Horizon
I’ve applied for work experience at the BBC with Horizon over December, I’m not yet sure if this would be okay with college but I think it would be ideal for me. At the moment I can see my ideal job as being a film editor, and if I continue to enjoy science this much I could end up being perfect for a very specialised job.
They asked in the application for an idea for a show that they haven’t done yet. I couldn’t decide on one idea so I told them these two:

The way the internet is affecting our brains
A very current issue which was written about only recently in New Scientist by Nicholas Carr in his article 'Surfing Our Way To Stupid'. He is also the author of The 'Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember' which could provide the basis for many of the topics covered. The program could investigate how the internet affects people of different ages - it seemed to improve brainpower in old people for example, how it affects productivity, and weigh up its pros and cons.

Synaesthesia
A fascinating neurological condition which affects around 1 in 23 people where the senses are mixed up, for example some can 'see sound'. The programme could investigate how and why it occurs, and could show an on screen test for the viewers to see whether they hear anything as they watch the silent animation. The audience would be interested because most people have some sort of letter / colour association. The programme could investigate the work of famous synaesthetes, including Kandinsky, Richard Feynman and Duke Ellington.


Visualising information

I’ve realised recently that I often find myself thinking in terms of visualising information.. Just the other night I was working out how much I had of my loan left after paying rent and wondered how my bank account over the year would look in a graph, with the three highest points just as my loan goes in.
I have an obsession with dodging crowds on the street, it really gets to me, and I honestly usually imagine the street from above with each person represented by a dot. How ridiculous some of our movements would look if you could see it like that, you could watch people wildly bending their paths to avoid others or you could see my speedy dot get stuck behind two slow moving dots etc. Etc....
Finally what made me notice this strange obsession was when I caught myself imagining my house and housemates in terms of glowing circles, like this:

So each person is represented by a colour, and when they first move in they keep to themselves and establish their place in their rooms. Over time as they get to know each other better the colours spread into each other and overlap, and in the end the house is just one big colourful glow......Yep.
Anyway fingers crossed for Horizon! I’ve decided to leave some things out of this blog post for another one which should be sooner than usual. Until next time...