PARI visit

Art and Science, two fields that require energy, creativity, out of the box thinking, faith and discipline and that are yet often seen as opposite worlds. 

The goal of art and science projects is for the arts to use concepts from science as a source of inspiration, and for science to use art as an attractive way to reach the non scientific population. 

Take astronomy:  All civilizations have fantasized and dreamed about the beauty that liven the sky. This is as true today as it was in the most romantic ages, except that now there are a lot more complex words and concepts behind the lives of stars than the used to be. We think we understand better how and where stars are born, why they don't fall, and how and where they die. This is where art can serve science, not everyone is keen on reading scientific articles about the life of pulsars,  about what they do and about what these fascinating celestial objects are. Even if I am I very well understand that other people find no pleasure in reading about how a pulsar helps describe the curvature of space-time. Maybe the same people would understand this idea or what makes a pulsar different from another celestial object if we could show them the difference through a media other than words and tables of numbers and articles?

Maybe a painting or a photograph of their real environment, but somehow twisted so that it doesn't look the way they usually see it would help them grab an idea of this other reality. Maybe an installation where they

are part of the art would help them question their sense of perception? Maybe if we show people one representation of a gravitational wave that is neither a graph on a scale nor a number, they might grow interested in the concept and start to investigate it, or just remember that it exists.

At PARI today Ellen and I were exposed to many instruments, numbers and images which can be the source of a project or exhibition,

allowing the concept to be  displayed to the public in a form that might speak to different people. We got to talk with Christi about observing celestial objects through radio telescopes or regular telescopes, observatory, radome

... we saw poles that capture the wavelength of solar flares, and other instruments to capture data such as magnetic fields or movement of the earth's crust. 

Education, research and outreach are the three missions of this STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) institute. They want to share with the broadest possible public their enthusiasm and passion about this field.

 They want to make it fun, interesting and accessible, and we artists have a role there. We pursue the same goal. Is Art only for the people who go to museums? Art is a way to share a passion, to share a vision of our environment. When physicists write theories they do the same thing as when we paint. And it is the goal of the Rensing Center and of SymbASA to create such connection, which they have done during my residence stay. It was a wonderful experience, one that we all wish will lead to other meetings and exchanges and practical creations, so that the bridge between art and science can be crossed by more  PARI visitors.

The uncertainty principle

This idea, developed by W Heisenberg is one of the most famous and popularized ideas in quantum physics. It is rather a good choice because it is a fascinating one and once understood it changes the way you appreciate the world around you. It tells us that there is a haziness in nature, that the ever changing dynamic of "things" are a limit to what we can know about the behaviour of quantum particles. At quantum scale, the most we can hope for is to calculate probabilities for where things are (their position) and how they will behave (their momentum) and the more accurately we know one of these values, the less accurately we know the other. 

The uncertainty principle questions how we see and measure things in the everyday world. The painting you see are particles of light, photons, that have bounced off the screen or the canvas and reached your eyes. What you see is only what you see, it's a combination of some fuzziness that I created with what your senses perceive and what as you see you will interpret from it. Each particle bouncing from the canvas carries with it information about the surface it has bounced from, at the speed of light. The photon is a medium, what about the particles that create the painting? Observing a subatomic particle, such as an electron, is not so simple. You might similarly want to bounce a photon off it and hope to detect that photon with an instrument but chances are that the photon will impart some momentum to the electron as it hits it and change the path of the particle you are trying to measure. Or because quantum particles move so fast, the electron may no longer be in the place it was when the photon originally bounced off it. Either way, your observation of either position or momentum will be inaccurate and, more important, the act of observation affects the particles being observed.

That painting tells a lot about what my work tries to achieve, the fuzziness of nature, and the invisible force that our senses are trained to forget so that it's easy to live in a world where a table is just a table and it's always there, and where what we see as empty is just really empty. But hopefully, The uncertainty principle will give you a glimpse of what I see and how I perceive my environment, it'll give you an idea of the horizon colour when sun sets on the pasture and on the round old mountains, of how the clouds move in the sky, and of how peaceful our surroundings here are.

under the light of Orion

Since I arrived here I have been obsessed with the sky. There is no light pollution in Pickens and very few clouds and every night I go out and look up and marvel at Orion which we can see right above us as mysterious as ever. What are you hunting here?
This morning, I woke up around 8:30, smiled because I was happy to be here and to have the time to do the things I love most, paint and write. I did my morning pages, then went to grab a cup of coffee and cookies, moved the laptop to the library, worked on my book for an hour and then painted. I painted surrounded by books and the soft music of the rain. I usually have great difficulties to work with small size canvases but this morning I had none. I used a small wood panel given by my weekend fellow painter Dylan (thanks again Dylan for that I'm not giving it back to you now) and whereas I thought, I'll just experiment on that because I'm not good with small size panels, I made this and I figured this is the product of Orion light bathing my every night.