Universe in a Box

Artist Statement


Carl Sagan was best known for being a communicator of science. He spent his life bringing science to the people, with his books and with his Cosmos television program, which transformed previously static data into colloquial, visual, and accessible forms which captured the world's imagination. 
"The art and animation we created for Cosmos had to enhance and support Carl's style of presentation and be, like his words, accurate and yet accessible, rigorous, and at the same time stirring." Carl Sagan's Universe, by Yervant Terzian
I see a parallel between the work of people like Sagan and data visualisation as each strive to do the same thing, in framing otherwise unreachable, ephemeral or hugely important pieces of information.


I think visual arrangements of ideas can determine and shape how we perceive them to a huge degree.
"It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world." Blaise Pascal, Pensees.
A heart monitor displays a human heartbeat as a single line. The image is iconic and globally understood, but the information about what is actually happening inside the body has been hugely simplified. What if there were a heart monitor that displayed the same information in a different shape, using a different sense, or perhaps even using a different medium? This is a crude example of how in the medical world, a visualisation can change the entire way people think about something.


My work has from the beginning been an attempt to convey to other people my obsession with the cosmic perspective. The ultimate goal for me would be to create an artwork that fulfilled the role of using information to change a person's perspective on how we fit into the cosmic arena.
Although my initial idea for the box was inspired by a computer simulation of the universe, I wanted to use something further removed from space to gather my data from. The sculpture was being made on a human scale, and so human numbers were more appropriate than the 'billions and billions' found in astronomical data. 
The box is made of three axis, the 26 letters of the alphabet, the 26 rounded amounts for their occurrence on a page, all done 26 times in series - 26,000 is the number of light years between our Sun and the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. 
I felt it was apt to collect data from Sagan's 'Cosmos' book because it was one of the things that first inspired be at the beginning of this project.
The insignificance of the action of tallying every letter of the alphabet for the 26 pages that I chose to represent corresponds to Sagan's message that the human life is nothing on the cosmic scale.
"Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of a view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron." Cosmos, page 240.

The collection of the data itself felt for me like a performance stretched over a period of time where I essentially read each page 26 times, once for each letter that I was counting. It felt like a vain attempt to take in the messages of the book which can never be fully realised.
It reminded me of the ideas in the theory of Materiality, where I had to go through a slow process which gave me the opportunity to understand what I was doing.


Whereas in 'Dozens and Dozens' I wanted the audience to react emotionally, like a James Turrell piece, this is more of an intellectual idea. It has the gravitas of real information. Giving myself the boundaries imposed by using data instead of creating a visual likeness purely on aesthetic grounds, and so in a sense, like the main artists in Systems Art, I handed over my artistic input to the data.
It was impossible for me to gain the degree of accuracy that I would have liked in the 3D graph. I was forced to use a certain amount of artistic license, although if I had access to more appropriate materials I believe something similar would be possible, perhaps on a bigger scale. For me though the box sits somewhere between data visualisation and sculpture. 
"Some scientific art seems like the visual equivalent of the scientific paper, but sometimes they can be poems too." Carl Sagan's Universe, by Yervant Terzian