Christopher O'Leary Lecture | Event 2

This morning, I attended a NanoLab summer institute lecture in CNSI.  Today there was guest lecturer, Christopher O'Leary (MFA graduate of UCLA!), who spent the hour telling us about his artwork, motivations, and how he manages to meld science together with art. Christopher has some very, very cool projects - he told us that his very interested in understanding how science and cosmology interact with the landscape, and hopes that through his artwork, he can visually render invisible scientific principles and phenomena that are always present but never seen. According to his artist bio online, "Christopher O'Leary explores notions of human potential through the lens of speculative fiction, comic book culture, and the histories of art and technology". Here are just a few of his projects that help to elucidate mathematical principles through art in a really innovative way.

Black Hole Simulation

Christopher worked with physicists at the University of Montana to study black holes.  From a photographer's prospective, he wanted to emphasize the spiral nature of black holes that interact with each other.  Thus, he worked with physicists descriptions, and through algorithmically generated code, created a visual representation of black holes.  He emphasized that combining art and science was a learning process, from understanding the different languages and numbers of science, to balancing the push-and-pull between being numerically accurate while also creating an immersive aesthetic experience.  The final product was displayed as a giant projection, which was awesome to see.

Black Hole Animation from Christopher O'Leary on Vimeo.

Griffith Observatory Cloud Chamber
Another project Christopher is working on is the Griffith Observatory Cloud Chamber.  The Cloud Chamber is a relatively simple device invented in the 20th century -- it is a plexiglass box full of supercooled vapor.  Cosmic rays and particles from the sun, along with background radiation from the environment, magnetizes this cooled vapor, rendering particles within the continuous stream of gas within the box.  As such, the lines that you see transiently pop up in the vapor are the result from stars and other planetary forces! In completing this project, O'Leary aims to visualize the invisible through innovative mediums, and as Dr. Ed Krupp of the Griffith Observatory stated, "This isn't education this is spectacle -- putting your body in relationship with galactic scale."

Griffith Observatory Cloud Chamber from Christopher O'Leary on Vimeo.

Dark Matter Detector 
O'Leary also took a trip to Occidental College to view their dark matter detector, known as the "Time Projection Device". This device attempts to physically capture dark matter through fine threads of steel.  When dark matter hits a single nucleus, a single electron will bounce off and be detected by these thin steel wires.  He said that this rare event only is projected once very few years!! The machine itself was beautiful, and contained a silky metallic sheet within the steel wires, which we learned is actually a solar sail (light pushes the sail to create energy!)


SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
The final project that Christopher told us about was a photography series he shot of SETI.  SETI was a research institution founded at Berkeley, and was the world's first crowdsourcing platform.  These huge satellites slowly turn in arcs and listen to different patches of the galaxy.  The 'noise' that they collect is translated into picture data that looks like fuzz. Thousands of people are part of the SETI project, looking through these data jpgs to find patterns that may indicate extraterrestrial  communication.  Interestingly enough, when these "fuzz" images are overlayed, they will slowly begin to form stars! Additionally, O'Leary brought up the point that the fuzz is maybe we can't understand because we are looking for human-based communication -- perhaps the fuzz itself is a form of communication that we cannot understand.  Professor Vesna then brought up an equally interesting observation that SETI members are studying sound, but instead of listening to this sound, they are asked to look at this visual representation.

Overall Lessons
I loved O'Leary's mission to visualize the invisible principles that surround and affect our daily lives.  It was very interesting to see that much of his artwork is rooted in mathematics and the coding of algorithms, reinforcing to me that math is just like spoken word language in its ability to convey concepts. The way that O'Leary described how he tweaks his codes and algorithms to enact small changes in the artwork was a great parallel to artists mixing in paint to create slightly different shades of color, or writers adding in adjectives to give extra weight to a certain sentence. Regardless of the medium of communication, all are masterpieces in their own right!

Sources:
"Christopher O'Leary." Christopher O'Leary. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 July 2014. <http://cargocollective.com/chrisoleary>.
"SETI 101." SETI Institute. SETI Institute, n.d. Web. 29 July 2014. <http://www.seti.org/node/662>.
O'Leary, Christopher. "Black Hole Animation." Vimeo. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 July 2014. <http://vimeo.com/64747163>.
O'Leary, Christopher. "Griffith Observatory Cloud Chamber." Vimeo. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 July 2014. <http://vimeo.com/97283293>.
Snowden-Ifft, Daniel. "Searching for Dark Matter." Daniel Snowden-Ifft. Occidental College, n.d. Web. 29 July 2014. <https://www.oxy.edu/faculty/daniel-snowden-ifft>.