Portrait of the artist, Estonia, 2013

WELCOME

When I was very small, before school age, one of my first memories was of coming downstairs while everyone else in the house was sleeping and setting up a game on a day bed in the living room. As well as conventional toys, I had many odds and ends, referred to as squit by my family. These might be bits of broken toys or other broken household appliances. Out of the mess of things I fashioned some kind of a mechanism. I do not remember exactly what I made but what I recall clearly was my sense of excitement at discovering I could connect levers and links and by moving one part cause this movement to be transmitted to other bits of my contraption. So long before I had chosen a path in life, I started down an idiosyncratic direction. Luckily for me I had very kind and loving parents who accepted my little quirks, my insistence that broken toys and other things should never be thrown away because they were still of use in my games. I was an instinctive constructivist and perhaps ‘recyclist’.

The first thing on the TV news I truly understood was the launch of sputnik. We saw no flames or fiery launch, just an announcement and the sound of the eerie beep broadcast by the satellite and picked up by Jodrell Bank radio telescope. That was 1957; I was now six years old, a child of the space age. I became fascinated by space, a dreamer of big dreams, I spent my time building spaceships, I imagined setting off alone to explore the universe. I was lucky, my mother, Yolande, was an artist and my father, Gerard, a mathematician at Cambridge University. They encouraged me to pursue my interests. The other noteworthy experience of my childhood is I had a grandmother who I very much loved but saw very rarely as she lived in Paris, came to visit us but once a year and we never visited her at all. Unlike visits from other older relatives, she was a ball of energy and great fun to be around. On the 14th March 1961, while playing happily in my bedroom, the phone rang downstairs in the hall. In those days phones were nearly always in hallways. The moment I heard the phone ringing I was grabbed by a powerful sense of shock as I knew with absolute certainty that it was to tell my father Ruth had died. I was so upset by this incident I did not dare tell another soul about it for many years.

Abstract Cosmology Jerusalem Light Festival 2009

My beloved granny was gone and I was notified by a mysterious psychic telegraph. For those who doubt this, I should point out that the sad feeling came as soon as the phone rang, and even if I could hear the words my father spoke the conversation would have been conducted in French which I did not understand. She had not been ill nor had there been any mention of her recently, there was no reason to expect the call to be about her. Perhaps this tension between being a very scientific little boy in most ways with a shocking mysterious experience was to lay the seeds of how I later turned away from being perhaps a physicist or engineer to an artist. My mother frequently took me to exhibitions, sometimes the whole family, more likely just me and my brother and sister after she was born. Her taste was in what would have been the contemporary art of the day plus the great abstract artists of the earlier 20th century from Picasso and Braque onwards. So, I was to receive an informal education into all this at a much deeper level than anything I might have learnt at school. She was a gifted artist although she remained completely unknown outside a small group of friends and never sold any work. My father, in the meantime, began to be recognised as a brilliant mathematician, but having no desire to rise higher in the academic world remained very close and loyal to his family.

And that granny, Ruth Fischer, was a person of truly extraordinary gifts, the co-founder of the Austrian communist party and at one time the leader of the German communists. A true idealist who fell out of favour with mainstream communism after personal arguments with Stalin, she was ejected from the party but remained a passionate socialist all her life. What makes someone an idealist? I can only speak for myself and sense that it arises from a deep dissatisfaction or fear. I recall the horror of my first day at school, and it was not the teachers I feared but the other children in the playground and the atmosphere of manic aggression. After an initial enthusiasm for CND in my teen years, I soon tired of the political banter that dominated the youthful left. Later I was to tire of the lack of talk among those alternative types seeking perfect tranquillity and the right master to follow. I decided ‘don’t follow leaders’, but trying to find your own way when you were already sure all straight careers were out of the question is no easy task. My early years I often felt alienated, yet time and again good luck was to light my way.

Dark Matter New York Hall of Science 1998

I left Cambridge to take a physics degree at Sussex University where my personal tutor was Sir Anthony Leggett who later received a Nobel prize for his work on superfluidity. Tony was just Dr Leggett when I was at Sussex. He was a brilliant, inspiring and enthusiastic teacher who truly loved his students and from him I gained a deep fascination for foundational issues in quantum mechanics.

A single day in 1970 was to change my life: a visit to the Hayward Gallery in London to see the Kinetics Exhibition. I had seen kinetics before, both in small shows in Cambridge and Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA the year before but this exhibition was on an altogether more monumental scale. I became entranced, particularly by the works of Julio Le Parc and Nicolas Schoffer. I did not give up my studies in physics but began at once to create kinetics. After graduating from Sussex I took a degree in Fine Art at Exeter. After graduating for a second time I came to London in 1977 where I was most fortunate to find a studio at Butler’s Wharf, a large old warehouse with a view overlooking the Thames. I could see Tower Bridge from where I sat to eat. Butlers was home to many artists, my nextdoor neighbour was Ann Bean, along the way many other artists some of who were or subsequently became very famous including Derek Jarman and Richard Wilson. Steve Cripps was the one artist I felt close too, he lived in the most magical chaos surrounded by a much scaled up version of the squit I had enjoyed as a child, thousands upon thousands of discarded things together with some fully functioning machine tools and welding equipment. His home was a small garden shed sitting the midst of this large cluttered studio space, an island just large enough for a bed, a kettle and little else. His work was wild, anarchic and included the use of fire which was eventually to be his undoing as he died in an accident during one of own performances. My time at Butlers was also ending; we were all evicted following a large fire in the building. These were turbulent times, punk was on the street, and the 70s were ending.

Phaeno Science Centre, Germany, 2012

Finding the art world not conducive to my hybrid way of thinking initially I went into a career in stage lighting. I had already lit a few shows while a student but my first big break was lighting Ken Campbell’s The Warp, a 23 hour cycle of plays performed at the 1979 Edinburgh Fringe. Subsequently in the 80s I specialised in avant-garde music and lit amongst others Morton Subotnick and Terry Riley. Quietly I continued to make kinetic art. After attending Art Transition ’90 at MITs Institute for Advanced Visual Studies, I decided to abandon my career in lighting to focus entirely on art. I have had numerous exhibitions all over the world and received permanent commissions from science and art museums. I have been the recipient of a number of prizes and awards starting at ARTEC, Japan in 1995. Often it is the first time that you do something that is most memorable and if luck is with you, a truly special experience. I recall the excitement of being invited to install in the vast atrium window of the BT HQ with a fine view out over St Paul’s cathedral in 1993. I recall arriving at Technorama, a science centre in Switzerland and the first place to commission a large permanent installation in 1995, my first appearance in USA in 1998 at the Hall of Science in New York. A particularly treasured memory was my first appearance at the first Jerusalem light festival in 2009 where I was invited to set up my installation in the archaeological park only yards from the Temple Mount and with Al-Aqsa mosque shining out over the magical landscape. In 2018 a work sold to the BEEP Electronic Art Collection was shown at Ars Electronica in Linz Austria.

Island of LIght, Smogen Sweden, 2018

I am best known for my discovery of a remarkable waveform: kinetic art that is a hybrid of harmonic and chaotic patterns. I have made these from desktop sized up to monumental pieces more than 10 metres tall. The small works were initially mass produced and marketed in USA under the name Stringray. More recently I have avoided commercial ventures to pursue my artwork. Along with discovering the kinetic phenomena, I invented a new form of light, chromastrobic light, which changes colour faster than the eye can see. This was developed to illuminate my waveform sculptures and I continue to refine and improve it with each new generation of technologies. Today it is uses high power LEDs controlled by custom electronic devices that can be autonomous or operated by touch screen.

Colour Light Waves, Bahrain, 2015

SPACETIME

I became interested in cosmology as a teenager in the 60s.   The hot topic then was whether or not the big bang had really happened. The name Big Bang had been invented by Fred Hoyle, largely as an insult to the idea. He was one of three, along with Herman Bondi and Thomas Gold who proposed an alternative, the steady state theory in which time was eternal and the universe was infinitely old and would continue forever. I preferred the steady state theory. Hoyle frequently appeared on science programs on TV at that time, he was a brilliant and ebullient speaker with a broad Yorkshire accent, so very different from the typical scientist. I became a big fan, and so it was with some regret I saw this theory fall as the evidence stacked up there really had been a big bang and as a consequence a beginning to time and space.

In relativity it is said that we inhabit a block universe. All Spacetime can be considered as a single block. A world line within this block traces a path through it, for example a single photon of light. A larger thing could be represented as a group of world lines, we could imagine them as curved and following some shared trajectory so they trace closely neighbouring paths through this block world. Since all time and space is represented within the block, nothing moves, it just exists in some eternal way that could only be viewed by some god like observer removed from space and time. While this is a fair description of how relativity describes the world, it is unintuitive and leaves no possibility for free will since all past and future co-exist. If that thing is me then the bundle of world lines describing my existence cannot be changed and would have been there since the beginning of time. One expert in the field, Julian Barbour proposed to do away with the block universe and time altogether.  When I read his book The End of Time, I became intrigued. Instead of a block, he suggests a vast ensemble of instants, like snapshots or frames in a movie, each one the entire universe captured at a certain moment. All is timeless but unlike a movie there is no longer any obvious connection from one moment to another, it is not embedded or frozen within a block, or aligned along a timeline. All possible connections between ‘nows’ may exist; it appears to be a world in which we might be free. Barbour calls his universe Platonia, a multi-dimensional landscape of possible universes. I decided to theme an exhibition around the idea and contacted Julian Barbour. He agreed to take part in a symposium we would organise to run concurrently with the opening of the exhibition, Timeless Universe, curated by Angela Molina was shown at the Sala Parpallo in Valencia in 2006.

Dancing In Waves, Cascais Festival, Portugal, 2016

Light Harp, installation Bury UK 2017

Perhaps my youthful enthusiasm for the steady state theory and subsequent disappointment had played a part in my becoming interested in Barbour’s idea that time may not exist but ultimately I remain unconvinced it is the right approach, there are threads that run through all existence and without time, it makes change harder to understand. We need time, lots of it, at least most of the time.

It is an often-repeated complaint that there needs to be a way to combine quantum mechanics with general relativity. These two great pillars of science have incompatible foundations. My struggles while still a physics student to understand this problem lead me to contemplate another related idea. Einstein was fond of thought experiments and it was while he was a teenager he first tried to imagine what it would be like to ride along beside a light wave, keeping abreast of these speeding waves. Eventually he came to realise that for light time does not exist. It has a special status. For light it is the same moment when it leaves a distant star and when it arrives in your eye or wherever it may go. This was a key insight and is a rare example of something timeless about which there is complete agreement in physics. In my little thought experiment, I tried to understand the state of ‘Samadhi’, as described by Paramahansa Yogananda in the Autobiography of a Yogi, first published in 1946. This is a timeless state of mind which he experienced after intensive meditation where consciousness expands to leave Earth and encompass the Cosmos. Now it has been found that the principles of quantum mechanics are extraordinarily wide ranging in fields where they can be applied. First Einstein had proposed the quantum to explain the behaviour of light, shortly after Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and others developed the idea to explain the structure of electrons in an atom. From there the next step was to understand the atomic nucleus, later came the laser, properties of semiconductors and much else.

String Theory, Anchorage Museum, Alaska 2010

Turning to a more speculative line of thought I wondered if one could apply quantum mechanics to understand the mind and consciousness.  The clue was in Yogananda’s description of Samadhi. Our mind and awareness is normally tightly bound within a sense of self and being inside our bodies. We can think about other things, far away things as astronomers do, but all the time we are also aware of being here in our bodies. In this alternate mental state we are no longer aware of, or bound within our bodies, but instead expand our consciousness. The Uncertainty Principle can be stated as setting a limit on how much can be known. If we ask where something is and measure this with absolute precision, we would have no way of knowing its momentum (roughly how fast it is going). Alternatively, if we knew exactly the momentum of something, then we could not know where it is. More strongly the principle implies the unmeasured property ceases to exist: with perfect knowledge of momentum, we have eliminated position. So I considered applying this same principle to consciousness. Say the challenge is to stop our minds, not just slow but completely stop: to switch off all internal churning and come to a state of perfect stillness. Achieve this and our mental momentum would be zero, precisely. And, as a consequence, we would cease to have a location, our position would no longer exist and this perfectly still mind would then expand to encompass all. Crazy you might say and dismiss this notion, or more critically engaging with the idea, you might say why try to stop our mind? All that would be necessary was to know our ‘inner’ momentum and know it very precisely. So we would need to know ourselves very well, and that in itself is challenge enough. Perhaps it is not just in Samadhi that the uncertainty principle applies, there are other mental states of flow where we have a more lucid sense of being. Musicians, dancers and artists of all kinds experience it in their work, sports people at their peak or a mathematician having an epiphany, some rare insight of something never before understood or conceived. Perhaps it was a crazy idea to apply quantum mechanics to the mind but this notion still persists with me that our inner sense of time is malleable and sometimes we do seem to be like light, time stops and we fly in our imagination.

Digital Creatures, Spinning Cosmos at 2017 edition, Rome

Children are often seen to spin in their games; it is the basis of most fairground attractions. It does not appear to be a serious subject, but we should not dismiss it as something of lesser significance, it is fundamental. Newton discussed its essentially mysterious nature by asking us to imagine a bucket of water. Now spin the bucket and observe the water seems in no hurry to follow the spin of the bucket.  Why is the water resistant to change? It possesses inertia, the same quality that keeps things going in a straight line if that is what they are doing will make things not spin or continue to spin. But spin really does have a state of perfect rest whereas the state of rest along a straight line is something quite arbitrary. We might say a rock is at rest sitting on the ground, yet we know the Earth moves, and the rock along with it. Angular momentum by contrast is more mysterious. I have for many years been exploring odd forms of rotation in my kinetic art. Objects that when set spinning, ‘decide’ to vibrate in response to produce graceful and beautiful forms. So this is a subject close to me.

Installation at Puca Festival, Slane Castle, Ireland, 2021

In April 2011, Michael Longo, a physics professor at the University of Michigan, published an article in Physics Letters (Phys. Lett. B 699, 224-229 (2011)) showing he had found evidence for spiral galaxies to prefer one direction of spin. The method he adopted was to get a team to look at photos, many thousands of them and make a judgement as to which direction they appear to be turning. To eliminate bias, half the images were mirrored before being scrutinised and the team members were not told which ones. Later this was corrected when the results were analysed and they showed a strong correlation with an apparent rotation around a pole, not so far from our Galaxy’s pole. I loved this idea and took this as a starting point for what has now become a series of exhibitions.  I should add perhaps that to an astronomer a pole is not a particular place like the North pole, it is  a direction. So, if we could fly in a star ship towards the North star, Polaris, when we got there, we could just keep going in the same direction. The first Spinning Cosmos installation was at MUMI in Montevideo as part of ArtFutura 2012. The next installation, one of the largest I have ever undertaken, was ArtFutura at Ex Dogana, the old Customs House in Rome in 2017. Both of these exhibitions were curated by Montxo Agora who founded ArtFutura and continues to present exhibitions around the World. (https://www.artfutura.org/v3/en/)

Spinning Cosmos Montevideo

First edition of Spinning Cosmos, 2012: Installation and excerpts from a lecture given at MUMI, Montevideo, November, 2012.

Longo and his team studied the orientation of thousands of galaxies but that is a relatively small number, galaxy catalogues have grown to billions. He could only use images of nearby galaxies as more distant ones show up as indistinct blobs with no obvious spiral structure. It is however known that galaxies form clusters and these clusters form larger regions, vast filaments, each home to thousands of galaxies, while around them there are voids bereft of all but a few lone stars. In recent work published in Nature in June 2021 Noam Libeskind together with his colleagues at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany have shown these filaments also to be rotating. It is no longer necessary to discern the spiral form of the galaxy; this new approach uses relative speeds of the movement of the galaxies within the filaments to infer spin.

To summarise, the Earth spins and together with all the other planets in the solar system orbit the sun in the same direction. Our entire galaxy rotates in one direction around its own pole, as do most other galaxies. Galaxies have more scattered axes but within our neck of the universe show a preferred direction, and at least some of the filaments from which the cosmos appears to be woven are themselves spinning. The further out we look the structures change but the tendency to spin persists. And at the opposite end of the size scale down at the microscopic and quantum level, quanta are classified according to their spin properties.

Buddha Field, still from Spinning Cosmos video with Galaxy data

How much of this have I incorporated in my installations? Michael Longo shared with me his data. This was a set of 25,000 galaxies chosen from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. For each one I had a catalogue number, location in the sky and measure of its distance recorded as a redshift and the direction of rotation. In parts of the video I showed the data displayed as text painted on virtual objects. As a backdrop to this I constructed a model of our local universe placing each galaxy in its correct location and distance within the virtual space.

For the upcoming edition of Spinning Cosmos curated by Aleksandra Stratimirovic at the Boras Museum of Modern Art in Sweden which opens in October 2022, I want to create a closer sense of connection for my visitors to the concept. I realised the cosmic spin we are most aware of is day and night  so I have proposed ‘artistic days’, which will be much shorter to allow our visitors to experience an entire day night cycle during a gallery visit. This will be achieved by gently fading up and down the house lights in the exhibition space while coordinating the kinetic sculptures and videos to switch off in the daylight, then during a twilight maybe lasting 2 or 3 minutes the sculptures will slowly begin to turn while the house lights slowly dim and we cross fade to video and special lighting. A night lasting perhaps 20 minutes before a dawn takes us back to a short ‘day’ of a few minutes completing the cycle within around half an hour.

Stage Design for Iris Van Herpen Paris collection 2020

Stage Design for Iris Van Herpen Paris Fashion week January 2020

In conclusion, as someone who has always shunned the orthodox, I am drawn towards unconventional ideas. In science as in everything we find group think and cultural wars. Yet those big ideas most of the community follow may contain shortcomings and I find it more interesting to focus on notions that do not follow the main path. At this time, biologists are beginning to acknowledge problems with the standard approach to evolution, the standard model of particles in physics has long been known to have limitations and cosmologists are currently struggling with another issue that is problematic in their standard model. I do not talk about those things, I choose the path less followed and enjoy the journey.

Performance of Colour Light Waves by Paul Friedlander, music and sounds by Ron Briefel, Georgina Brett and Lady Synth, 9th and 16th April 2022 at the Bookery Gallerie, London.

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All images copyright and courtesy of Paul Friedlander

Art, Creativity, Imagination, Installation, Science, Sculpture, Space, Technology, Time