Visions of Light
Issue 8 December 2014
Illuminating Light
Sidney Perkowitz explores how our knowledge of light’s intangible nature has evolved into deeper understanding – deeper, but incomplete, for light still holds mysteries. Yet we know it well enough to predict its behavior and manipulate it with exquisite finesse for scientific research, technological application, and aesthetic use.
Lucida
Lucida is an autonomous image-making machine that creates analogue images in real-time, without generating a permanent record. The images defy classification as digital photographs, radiological scans or three-dimensional computer graphics but allude to all three and are believable as scientific images, while existing exclusively as an artwork.
The Light of Consciousness
Blending physics, psychology, and philosophy, internationally renowned writer, Peter Russell, leads us to a new worldview in which consciousness is a fundamental quality of creation. He is fascinated by how light is a recurrent theme in meditation, religion, philosophy and modern physics, and asks ‘Does physical reality and the reality of the mind share common ground in light?’
Mesoscopic Ripples in the Neural Sea
Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Current findings, particularly regarding wave phenomena, are employed by the artists to investigate questions of perception and perpetuity.
Glass&Light
For Chris Wood, her canvas is glass and her medium is light. She uses one to manipulate the other with subtle interventions placed in the optical plane, harnessing patterns of light into exquisite tiny movies or streams of fluttering images, which recall ephemeral glimpsed moments in the natural world.
Wigner’s friends
The Soyuz capsule roared into the pre-dawn darkness just after 3 a.m. Monday (2100 GMT Sunday) from the Russian manned space facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, en route for the International Space Station. Aboard the capsule are Russian Anton Shkaplerov, NASA’s Terry Virts and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy. There was also a small telescope, that will be used in an extraordinary project, Wigner’s friends, that will create a universal show consisting of all possible works of art at once.
When Light is Lost, Life is Lost
“It is virtually impossible to look at the workings of the sky without somehow being moved by it. There is no greater teacher of time and space than the sky, no greater courier to the sense of majesty, no greater dwarfer of one’s own significance, and no greater prompter to the question ‘why’. To watch and interpret the skies has always been one of man’s most basic instincts, providing a way of placing oneself in the context of the universe.” In this article, Richard Bright explores the ‘significance of the sky’ through astronomy, myths and metaphors of the eclipse, together with the work of James Turrell.
First Light Machine
First Light Machine is an original work by J. Wingfield.
By lending a voice to the many discoveries unfolding in the fields of quantum theory, relative physics and cosmology, the author invites the reader to explore – through a poetic view – ideas and images as revealed through advances in theoretical science.
Hydrogeny
‘Nature’s simplest atom and mother of all matter, hydrogen, feeds the stars as well as interlaces the molecules of their biological descendants – to whom it ultimately whispers the secrets of quantum reality’. Hydrogeny continues Evelina and Dmitry’s work in constructing art installations that offer ever-transforming phenomena for the viewer’s observation.