Djanogly Gallery
University of Nottingham, UK, Closes 27 April
For many, art and science are still seen as distinct approaches to understanding the world around us. While qualities like intuition or creativity are integral to both practices, the rules they play by are quite different. Artists tend to ask subjective, open-ended questions whose answers depend on your perspective. On the other hand, scientists combine reason and experimentation in the hope of uncovering a common, objective view of reality.
Cosmic Titans: Art, science and the quantum universe, an immersive exhibition at the Djanogly Gallery at the University of Nottingham, UK, challenges this entirely. The installations emerged from years of collaboration between nine artists and leading labs across the UK. These works don’t just reflect scientific ideas, they also offer new understandings that directly contribute to research.
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The exhibition originated in physicist Silke Weinfurtner’s at the University of Nottingham. She builds tabletop experiments that corral water or superfluid helium into specific configurations that mimic the behaviour of black holes and the primordial universe.
These extreme physical systems are too far away in space and time for direct experiments, so exploring analogues gives Weinfurtner tangible insights into their behaviour – as the mathematics that underpins both is the same.
In one installation, An Early Universe, artist Alistair McClymont takes similar fluid systems and makes them even more palpable. A large bass speaker placed in a dark room agitates a dish of water as it sweeps through a range of low frequencies. Next, a strobe light projects mathematical patterns created by the sound waves onto a wall. Because our bodies are mostly water, the bass vibrates inside us, too. As the patterns on the wall shift from order to chaos, you feel a peculiar sensation that mirrors what you are seeing. And, as a bonus, collaborating with McClymont led Weinfurtner to find new optical methods that use strobe lights to measure fluid systems in her lab.
Other works on display also seek to make the intangible, tangible. The Quantum Lens, for example, is a mixed-reality experience exploring counterintuitive quantum ideas. Projections inside a VR headset allow you to grapple with material reality in a new way, making some sense of how many possible worlds may collapse into the single one we experience.
Another installation, Ringdown by Conrad Shawcross (pictured), explores the final moments of two spiralling black holes: two bronze spherical bells orbit each other in a giant cage crammed with vibrating steel rods. Listening to the eerie sounds that ensue brings you closer to these cataclysmic events – astrophysicists who study the gravitational waves emitted by colliding black holes have recently started doing much the same by listening to their data.
All of this highlights the role that observers play in both art and science. At its opening, Cosmic Titans curator Ulrike Kuchner said: “Art challenges you to take a position. As an audience, you complete the artwork with your own memories, your own emotions, and with your own personal context – something science rarely does.”
Fundamental physics especially tries to strip away the personal and offer an objective perspective. Yet recent advances into the foundations of quantum physics suggest that reality isn’t absolute and objective, but rather comes about through negotiating the perspectives of different observers.
Ultimately, as Cosmic Titans reminds us, there are deeper truths underlying science and art. Not least that objective reality is an illusion.
