- Good evening and welcome to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab .
I'm Dave Nelson standing in for Tom Zinnen tonight.
And Wednesday Nite @ The Lab meets, as you know,
every week, fifty weeks of the year,
sponsored by the Biotech Center, UW Science Alliance,
UW-Extension, Cooperative Extension,
Wisconsin Public TV, of course, the Alumni Association,
and, for tonight, the Madison Science Museum.
It's a real pleasure for me to introduce tonight
Floor van de Velde who is spending some days in Madison
assembling an exhibit that is the first exhibit
in the new Madison Science Museum
which will open up in the fall near the Square.
Floor's an artist,
and the exhibit she's brought to the Science Museum
represents a fusion of science and art.
This is the title of her talk: Luminous Scores,
Reflections on Light and Art in Science.
It's a combination of artworks, interactive installations,
pictures, photographs made in the ultraviolent and infrared,
a series of uses of light
that challenge your way of thinking about light.
And I think you'll find it fascinating.
We hope you'll come to the opening
of the new Science Museum late in October of this year.
Floor's artistic work is actually very fundamentally
connected to the University of Wisconsin.
It turns out that at the turn of the 19th century,
last century, 20th century, there was a professor here,
Robert Wood, who became known widely
as the father of ultraviolet and infrared photography.
He was in the vanguard of people who recognized
that you could actually photograph things using light
that you couldn't see: infrared and ultraviolet.
He developed a filter
that would filter the visible light out
and allow IR and UV to go through.
And that filter, called a Wood filter after him,
it turns out to be what makes black light work.
Those things are masks
that none of the visible come through.
He also did some interesting work with sound,
and he managed somehow to photograph ultrasound waves.
And we'll here a little about all of this from Floor.
Floor is a South African who has also lived in Belgium.
She lives in Boston now.
Her artistic work
involves light in all kinds of ways, as you'll see.
She has a graduate degree from MIT in an area
called Art, Culture and Technology.
That's not your standard Chemistry major.
And, she now teaches at the School
of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
She's also associated with an art collective
in San Francisco, the Night House Studio.
Her talk tonight is Reflections on Light in Art and Science.
Please join me in welcoming Floor van de Velde.
(applause)
- Thanks, Dave, that's a very generous introduction.
Thank you for coming.
Yeah, the title of my talk is Luminous Scores,
also the title of the exhibition,
Reflections on Light in Art and Science.
As I go through the talk,
you might start to understand a bit more
what the word "scores" means in general,
relating to this exhibition, but also what it means to me
in terms of how I approach my practice
and how I approach these works
in terms of the collaboration with the museum.
I really want to thank the Madison Science Museum
for inviting me to envision and together collaborate,
and put on a really awesome exhibition
that's literally in the works right now.
It also happens to be the International Year of Light,
as designated by the UN General Assembly.
And, it's the International Year of Light
and Light-based Technologies to raise global awareness
about how light-based technologies can provide solutions
to challenges such as energy, education,
agriculture and health.
Of course as an artist,
this means something different to me.
I think about these things as well,
but it begs the question: what exactly is light?
I think it depends who you ask.
And, I think, light means many different things
to many different people.
And, I think, especially this week has made me realize
that there are a lot of different answers.
And, especially in talking to some of the scientists here,
how they think about light is vastly different
from how I view light.
In architecture, use of natural light
is not just functional, but also symbolic.
Here we see the interior of the Pantheon Dome
where the oculus symbolizes the arched vault
of the heaven or the heavens.
This specific oculus or this architecture
has influenced contemporary light art as well,
as you'll see a little bit later when I'll introduce artists
like James Turrell and Robert Irwin.
Stained glass as an art form
reached its height in the Middle Ages.
Of course, there's also something we're very familiar with.
And, light as a medium in the arts, of course,
has a very, very long history.
I can't possibly explain all of it in one slide,
but going back to the Renaissance with Chiaroscuro
where light is used to achieve a sense of volume
and depth perception, or Man Ray's light painting.
Here a portrait of Picasso.
And then later on, of course, also
contemporary minimalists' use of light with sculptures
like Dan Flavin and some of the other artists
that I will introduce.
Today, very much there's a dialogue also
between architecture and light
and artists that work with light.
You're starting to see many artists
that are using light to actually create space,
and to bend space, and to work with space,
and create a whole different feeling of space.
This is Carlos Cruz-Diez from Argentina,
and he creates these rooms that are just filled
with different colors of light, that bathe you in light,
and you just really get the sensation
that each space feels entirely different.
Interesting things start happening
when artists start collaborating with scientists
or start really thinking about the physics of light.
Here you see a piece by Olafur Eliasson.
It's called "Your Uncertain Shadow".
I don't know how many of you are familiar
with Olafur's work, but all his pieces
are prefaced with "your",
meaning that each piece is your experience.
He puts the viewer in the center of the experience.
I also think about art this way.
Here we have halogen lights that have different color bulbs,
and when you move in front of them
in the white projection screen, you see colored shadows.
This gives the viewer sort of a different sense of light,
also introduces them to aspects of light.
For example here, additive light.
They get a sense of what that actually looks like
and what that means.
As an artist, I understand light very much connected to color.
But as it turns out, of course, the visible spectrum
is a very, very tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
And in fact, when we start looking around,
when we start going past the visible spectrum,
we have ultraviolet, infrared and - I won't even talk
about X-rays, or microwaves, or radio waves.
At some point, I'm sure, as an artist I'll be able
to investigate those and include those in my work.
But for the time being, I'm focused,
especially in this exhibition, on ultraviolet and infrared.
So, this exhibition has really allowed me
to broaden my understanding of light,
which brings me to this very colorful character
that Dave introduced earlier, Robert Wood,
and for me, has been a very large inspiration
for this exhibition.
Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts.
He was a physicist and an inventor.
And I formed links between his scientific discoveries
and the art that is going to appear in the exhibition.
He's the first to make photographs
showing infrared and ultraviolet radiation.
He's also the first person to photograph UV fluorescence.
And these so-called "black lights" that we talk about now,
emitting UV are also referred to as "Wood's light"
these days.
He also coined the term "Fish Islands"
in his book "Physical Optics"
which was written in 1911, I believe.
And, he coined it "Fish Islands" because of how a fish
would see light from underneath the lake.
He created a whole camera filled with water
so he could actually see the word around him in 180 degrees.
Besides these, he's had many other discoveries
and inventions.
He really was an incredible person.
I read a biography about him written in 1938,
very interesting.
For example, he also wrote a best-selling book of poetry,
and I actually brought a copy with me
that Dave will pass around for you to look at.
It's a first edition, so please handle carefully.
It's going to be included in exhibition,
but I thought it'd be nice for you to see this book.
It's called "How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers
"and Other Wood-cuts".
It's a beginner's guide to flornithology.
And it just sort of shows Robert Woods' curious spirit
and his sense of humor which I'm really very fascinated by,
because, as an artist, that's how I approach life as well.
And it's just so nice to see that a scientist
also has that approach to life.
For most people, when you say UV-light or black light,
this is sort of the image that they have.
It's associated with night life or Halloween parties.
But strictly speaking, black light is a kind of UV-light.
It's light that emits ultraviolet radiation.
So, the sun is a source of the full spectrum of UV
that reaches the earth and it can penetrate our skin.
And I'm sure you've seen on sunscreen bottles,
you'll have UVA, UVB, and you'll also have UVC.
UVA accounts for 95% of UV radiation
that reaches the earth,
and this penetrates the second layer of skin.
UVB are also harmful rays that cause sunburn,
and an increased exposure can risk DNA
and other cellular damage in living organisms.
I'm not sure what UV-Vacuum is (laughs),
yet to be discovered.
I was very inspired by UV light earlier on
in 2012 and 2013
and made several works using fluorescent light,
I mean UV fluorescent light.
I'll show you the next slide
which will you give you more of an idea
of what this really looks like.
They're large sheets of fluorescent acrylic,
etched on CNC routers.
They're about 4 by 7 feet, hanging from the ceiling
underneath a matrix of black light.
This is the view from the bottom.
I'm not sure why I have two titles here but (chuckles),
so make it extra-clear.
But this, this piece is called "Box for Luminous Squares",
actually was the smallest piece in the show,
and the one that really got me thinking the most.
So, these are off-cuts from the other pieces
that I made from fluorescent acrylic,
and I put them in an antique Kodak slide box.
And I had a pair of gloves for people
to handle these squares with
and to be able to look through the room
and observe the rest of the pieces through these slides.
And at the end of the exhibition,
everyone could take a slide home with him.
But it sort of begged this idea of how do you re-activate
the act of looking, merely looking at something.
You invite someone to explore a space,
to look at your exhibition,
but how do you really engage them?
How do you give them autonomy
to look at their surroundings in their own way?
An exhibition that was really inspiring to me
is called "The Responsive Eye".
This was a show of optical art,
or more commonly known as "op-art", in 1965,
presented at the MoMA,
which caused quite an uproar:
people weren't used to this kind of art.
Typical op-art is, of course, in black and white.
I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with op-art.
And op-art gives an impression of movement:
hidden images, flashing and vibrating patterns,
swelling or warping.
And I'm including a few examples here
of the more familiar op-artists:
Bridget Riley.
Victor Vasarely.
Jean-Pierre Yvaral,
who was actually the son of Vasarely.
Julio Le Parc.
And what's especially fascinating to me about these works,
I mean, I think, if I can just go back a couple of slides,
we look at this and we think, "That's a little cheesy";
"I don't really like that."
But if you think this was created
before the advent of computers and graphics,
this was incredible to be able to paint this freehand,
so were these works.
So, I think as someone who half-way through
grew up with computers,
I'm very fascinated by how you actually create this
using just paint and canvas.
When I was reading through the press release
for the Responsive Eye,
there was a part of the press release that caught my eye,
pun intended.
It says here, "This new art, called by various names
"Optical", "Retinal", "Cool", "The New Abstraction",
"establishes a new relationship
"between the observer and a work of art."
And I'll come back to this in a little bit.
"Although the works themselves are entirely static,
"they appear to move because of the use
"of various optical devices."
And this really started, it helped me sort of think
about this idea of how do we use our eyes.
I think in an age where we all are used to screens,
I think we have all become very lazy looking at, at art,
and not taking the time.
I mean, sometimes I go to a museum
and I see people run in, take an image, and run out,
and I'm thinking, "What has that person experienced
"of that art?"
Absolutely nothing.
But it's the desire to want to move
through as many pieces of art as you possibly can.
So what are the potentialities of a visual art
capable of effecting perception so physically and directly?
Can an advance understanding and application
of functional images open a new path
from retinal exhortation to emotions and ideas?
Interesting question.
I'm not sure if the effect is fully visible here;
on my screen it's just really popping out.
So, this is one of the pieces
that will be mounted at the Madison Science Museum,
still working on it, but this is an earlier rendition.
It's called "Transit Sublime", and I'm calling it "transit"
because, really when you look at it in real life,
this image probably,
I don't know if you really get the effect,
but when you're looking at this print,
it really does start to move.
And with the added lights and the fluorescent plexi
and the blacklight, it really starts vibrating.
And the longer you look at it, the more it starts to move.
Something else I'm investigating in this exhibition
is infrared photography.
I wanted to include some of Robert Woods' original
infrared photographs, but you can't really see
much of what's going on.
They look like black and white images.
Of course, the quality is not that great.
So, I'm including a more contemporary example
of infrared photography
where you can see the other-worldly result
from using an infrared filter.
Our eyes cannot see IR light.
It's beyond what's classified as "visible spectrum",
as we saw earlier.
You can take photographs using infrared filters.
You can also have your camera adapted
to only take infrared photography.
While I was looking at infrared photography,
I also found this example on NASA's site.
In fact, NASA has quite a few images of earth,
of volcano, volcanic eruptions in infrared.
So, what you see here is a section of earth
north of Fresno in California.
So, right now California, 82% of California
is in a state of extreme drought.
58% is an exceptional drought, and it's only getting worse.
So, on the left you can see in 2011 everything that's red
shows you what is vegetation.
On the right, only three years later,
you can really see the impact of the drought.
Everything that's brown is where we've lost vegetation.
Interestingly, you can see
where agriculture is taking place, how those areas
still remain red in the infrared spectrum.
If you look carefully, too, you'll see
that the lakes have shrunk as well.
It's a little hard to tell here.
But I think images like this really are helpful for us
to understand what's happening,
especially looking at our planet from such a distance.
It would be really hard to tell what that actual impact is.
My response to these images--
So these images are at the Madison Science Museum as well.
I'm just going to show you a few.
But I decided to use Google Earth
and sort of have my own tour around the planet,
planet Earth, and see what I see.
Here's Al Karak in Jordan.
Image on the left is just the image
as I took it from Google Earth,
and I'm faking infrared a little bit here
by swapping the red and the blue channels in Photoshop,
but you basically get the same effect.
And what I find really interesting here
is it creates almost an abstract painting,
it becomes other-worldly.
Another example of Lake Junin in Peru.
Image on the left, how it's seen normally;
on the right, infrared.
I'd like to back to this image of Robert Wood,
because of all the images,
all the images that I research for this exhibition, I think,
this is the one I kept coming back to,
the one that really fascinated me, everything about it:
the way he's dressed; how he's rather serious,
but at the same time you can kind of see
he's not that serious.
And after having read about his life
and understanding more about his character,
I think this image really spoke to me.
This image is included in exhibition, and it's amazing
how one image can inspire an entire, you know,
way of thinking and collection of works.
And that's exactly what happened to me with this image.
So, in the field of optics, Robert Wood was very active,
and he invented and improved upon diffraction grating,
and he was very active in spectroscopy as well.
I didn't know what diffraction grating was
when I read about this.
So, I had to, of course, look up pictures,
because that's how I think, in pictures.
In fact, I think most people think in pictures.
But, diffraction grating sounds really complicated,
but when you really think,
when you divide the word up "diffraction" and "grating",
it really starts making sense.
It's a plate of glass or metal
ruled with very close parallel lines.
And you can produce a spectrum by diffraction
and interference of light with these plates.
So, in order to separate light of different wave lengths
with high resolution, diffraction grating is used.
I just love this image.
To me, of course, as an artist, it's just beautiful.
But this is taken with a spectrograph.
It allows you to look at wave-lengths of light,
either absorbed or admitted from chemical species.
And a spectrograph will tell you
the wave-length of each type of light that is emitted.
And I guess, to me it's just amazing
how something like light can give you information
about something else.
So, this information I took and came up with this sculpture
that's also going to be at the Madison Science Museum.
For now, I'm calling it the "Diffraction Sculpture".
I'm sure I'll think of a more romantic title.
This is a not-so-good image.
I promise I will get better images.
But this was my response to diffraction grating.
It's an interactive sculpture.
It's basically a table about 30 inches high
that you can interact with.
You can play with the shape and turn it around
and really see the effect of the diffraction grating.
You could use your own cell phone with a light
or you could use other single point light sources
that I will provide in the room.
This essay that I read, "Photography of Sound Waves
"and the Demonstration of the Evolutions
"of Reflected Wave-fronts with the Cinematograph",
which sounds very complicated,
and in fact, I think I understood maybe a tenth
of the essay, but it was interesting, nonetheless.
But what I got out of it is that Wood is trying
to explain the nature of single-point waves.
He was very frustrated with the students,
that couldn't seem to grasp the difference
between a wave and a front,
and instead of trying to explain it
through mathematical equations, he decided to use pictures.
So what he did was take a single,
single wave-point
and he photographed this with a cinematograph,
and this was the result.
Here on this next slide, you can see a diagram
which are abstractions of the results
which I then took and cut fluorescent discs
that have these patterns etched on them.
I don't have an image yet of what the room
is going to look like since I'm still working on it,
but I basically created 24 discs
with these wave-patterns on them.
And they're going to be hanging in a room
that is lit with ultraviolet light, with black light.
So, I also wanted to talk about some precedents.
Artists that I've collaborated with, scientists,
artists that have crossed over to other disciplines.
And I think two artists
that I have always found very interesting
are Robert Irwin and James Turrell.
This is an image of them collaborating
at the Garrett Corporation in Los Angeles.
They were investigating sensory deprivation studies.
And this was part of an art and technology program
initiated by LACMA, the LA County Museum of Art, in 1967.
So, here we have James Turrell and Robert Irwin
in what's called an anechoic chamber,
which is a room designed to absorb reflections of sound
or electromagnetic waves.
I don't know, have any of you been
in an anechoic chamber before?
It's quite a scary, but amazing experience.
Of course, artists are tricksters, and they thought
it would be a great idea to lock people up
for 10 minutes at a time, switch off all the lights
and see what happens.
So what happened was participants
came out a little freaked out, most of them.
They started hallucinating, they started hearing things.
Some of them reported that they could hear their heartbeat,
which was disconcerting for some.
Some even said they could hear their blood flow,
which I find dubious, but you never know.
Some of them said they tried to clap,
and they could hear the bones crack in their body.
This led them to investigate
this kind of experiments further.
Robert Irwin worked with sensory deprivation.
Turrell moved forward into what's called
the "ganzfeld experiment".
And most of his work,
as you'll see in the next couple slides,
he really expanded on this one idea of sensory deprivation
and visual deprivation,
and it really informed the rest of his career.
So, what is ganzfeld?
Ganzfeld is German for "entire visual field".
It describes this unsettling sensation
when you experience total visual deprivation.
It's often experienced by Arctic explorers and pilots
that navigate dense fog and blinding snowstorms.
You lose all sense of up and down and left and right.
So, when everything in the visual field
is the same color and brightness,
the visual system shuts down.
And in this homogenous field
white equals black equals nothing.
And when this occurs for extended period of time,
a viewer can become subject to hallucinations,
or so-called "prisoner cinema".
They also call it "prisoner cinema" because of people
that are being put in isolation for a very long time:
they've reported to experience similar effects
that you would if you experienced a Ganzfeld Experiment.
A very cheap way of experimenting with ganzfeld
is to take a ping pong ball, cut it in half,
put it on your eyes and stare at red light for,
if you can, longer than five minutes.
I just wanted to show that ganzfeld really can be any color.
And of course, here it's very ha6rd to see,
but it could be blue, it could be white.
Flood is a piece I made in 2012 while I was at MIT,
which revisits these experiments of Turrell and Irwin.
Viewers would wear custom-made goggles,
and inside the goggles
there's acetate back-lit projector foam.
This is foam, it's back-lit foam basically,
and it's foam that allows for light to come through,
but not color or shape, no form, only light.
And what I did, what I subjected them to,
was put them seven feet away from a very large screen
and flashed very bright colors very fast.
Needless to say, a few people had to leave;
I had to have a warning, as well.
But, so these bright, luminous colored planes
were projected from an overhead projector,
and I had a score accompanying it
with very simple frequencies: either extremely low
or extremely high, according to what I was projecting.
And what I was trying to see is, well, first of all:
is there any connection between color, light and sound?
It's every artist's obsession, of course.
I've pretty much come to the conclusion
that at the moment it seems quite arbitrary.
I know we often talk about synesthesia
and how we have connections between color or light
and sensation or taste.
I just feel like it's still very subjective.
So, I'm still questioning: is there a connection?
And I asked people afterwards what they saw,
and people reported different things
which lead me to believe that the way we experience light
is still very, very subjective.
These are called "bed specs" that I discovered.
So, after I designed these goggles,
I got interested in, you know, looking more into
like what kind of different glasses,
or how can I individualize an experience
when I have several people in the room.
So, I thought, "why I can, I can make glasses",
and then I found these glasses.
They're called "bed specs",
and they sort of work like a periscope.
But the idea is that you can just lay in bed,
and you don't have to crank your neck to read;
you can just lie down and read.
There's no equivalent for the Dutch word "tasten",
but it basically means to search
or hunt with your eyes in the dark.
I'm very inspired as well by Lee Ufan
who is a Korean minimalist painter and sculpture
based in Japan.
I'm not going to show any of his work right now,
but this quote is from Lee Ufan,
"The hand becomes an eye that fuses all five senses
"and sees things whole."
He's also an advocate of de-modernization
and de-Westernization in theory and practice.
So, I was reading a lot about Lee Ufan's ideas
and thinking about these "bed specs",
and designed a piece called "Seeing Away".
This was a piece made in 2012
where I got to terrorize my professors.
I gave them these glasses to wear,
and I asked them to engage with every-day objects:
pens, glasses, food, champagne.
Needless to say, champagne was first to go,
and then things got really fun.
And I asked them to perform everyday actions,
like eating, drinking, writing, conversing.
Some even tried to walk around.
But the effect is quite disconcerting
when you have these glasses on.
They're really meant to be lying down,
lying still and reading a book.
But once you start getting up and interacting with the world,
strange things start happening.
I thought this experiment was going to last
about 15 minutes,
but people stayed in the room for two hours.
This was the initial set-up.
I tried really hard to find glasses
that didn't have tiger-print on them.
So I was very upset at first;
but, you know, everyone liked it,
they preferred it even.
This was the set-up of the whole table.
I think there were about 20 people.
If anyone would like to invite me to repeat this experiment,
I would be very happy to; it's very fun.
Which brings me to phenomenology,
which is something I thought about a lot
while I was in school.
It comes from an academic disciplines of philosophy
and psychology, based on the work of philosophers
Edmund Husserl and later developed by Heidegger.
And I put this description up here
which can be very confusing,
so I wrote a couple more notes to maybe help us understand
a little bit more.
In its broader sense,
phenomenology refers to a person's perception
of the meaning of an event as opposed to the event
as it exists externally or outside of that person.
The focus of phenomenologic inquiry
is what people experience in regard to some phenomenon
or other and how they interpret those experiences.
A phenomenological research study is a study
that attempts to understand people's perceptions,
perspectives and understandings of a particular situation
or a phenomenon.
In other words, a phenomenological, always fun to say,
research study tries to answer the question:
what is it like to experience such-and-such?
Back to the work of James Turrell,
who is really interested in this idea
of thresholds of perception,
and he's also very interested in phenomenological events
and occurrences.
These pieces that he made, has anyone experienced
a Turrell piece in real life?
They are incredible and very mysterious.
There is absolutely no way an image
can do justice to his work.
What you see right here is basically a large room
that is lit very, very evenly,
which, trust me, is really hard to do.
And at the end, another light source
that's so evenly lit that it seems as if it's one wall
with a sticker on it, or a piece of paper.
Yet, when you go close by and you stick your hand in,
the space continues.
They've had to start putting warning signs on the walls,
unfortunately, because people fell into these spaces,
which is a shame, because for me the whole beauty
of these kind of works is exactly that ethereal,
you know, immersive power.
The idea of visual ambiguity is nothing new, of course,
when you look at the Necker cube:
the ambiguous line-drawing
that, I'm sure, all of you are familiar with.
Each part of the picture is ambiguous,
but the human visual system picks one interpretation
to make the whole consistent.
You either see the one or the other.
In James Turrell's "Afrum",
he took this idea of the Necker cube
and tried to reproduce it in light.
So, using artificial light,
he created disorientation of sensing space.
Like the Necker illusion,
"Afrum" can be cognitively manipulated
to invert into corner or avert into a projected cube
that juts out towards us.
I tried to think about this in my own work.
This is a piece called "Pattern is Movement"
which will also be at the Madison Science Museum.
This is a detail.
I'll just go to the next slide
so you can see more of what's actually going on here.
There's no interpretation that achieves primacy here.
There is no real object to be had, but rather,
what I'm interested in here is how can we manipulate
our own perceptional mechanisms.
When you look at this piece for a long time,
you start being confused with what's figure
and what's ground.
I've always been interested in that concept:
how do we know what's in front of us and what's behind?
We have this automatic way of being able to tell.
So, obvious an artist, I like to mess around with that.
Which brings me to defamiliarization.
Which is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences
common things in unfamiliar or strange ways
in order to enhance perception of the familiar.
It's a literary device coined by Viktor Shklovsky
in his essay "Art as Device".
This was written in 1917.
And on the left, you'll see an image of "Gulliver's Travels"
which is a book which is full of defamiliarization
where scale is taken to extremes,
in order for you to rethink, you know,
what are these situations.
Defamiliarization is a central concept in 20th century art
and theory, and ranges over movements,
including Dada, Postmodernisim, Epic Theatre,
Science Fiction, to name only a few.
And it's really this paragraph in the essay
that caught my eye, "The purpose of art is to impart
"the sensation of things as they are perceived
"and not as they are known.
"The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar"
"and to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty
"and length of perception
"because the process of perception
"is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."
I really agree with this sentiment
and in all my work I always try to think,
"Is this what I'm doing?"
If you say to something, "I'm trying to make it difficult",
that actually is a good thing,
because it awakens your senses.
It breaks free of this habitual perception
that we're all experiencing right now
with all the screens that're around us.
Case in point.
So the idea of signal and noise ratio:
why are we always trying to find the signal,
and we ignore the noise?
And what happens is, we miss things.
So as an artist, maybe it's not about the signal;
maybe it's about the noise.
How do we pick up the signal, ignore the noise, vice versa?
How do we find things
that we're not necessarily looking for?
Is there a way to defamiliarize something
as simple as the sky, something we look at every day,
something that just seems so familiar
that we barely even look at the sky?
James Turrell has found a way how to do that
in his Skyspace works.
It's basically a natural light show.
And what he does is create apertures in spaces,
so that you can look at the sky in a different way.
By framing a natural phenomena,
he creates a new context for looking and seeing.
Some more Skyspaces.
I believe there are about 30, 40, 50,
I'm not sure at this point
how many there are around the world
where you can experience Skyspaces, but you can...
Some of them that stay open after sunset,
it's amazing to sit there and see
how the sky slowly shifts during sunset,
which is a vastly different experience
than sitting, for example, on the beach to watch the sunset.
So of course, Turrell had to buy a crater in 1974.
He was a pilot and decided to find a big, big space
to continue his work.
"At Roden Crater I was interested in taking
"the cultural artifice of art out into the natural surround.
"I did not want the work to be a mark upon nature,
"but I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature
"in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars
"empowered the spaces.
"I wanted an area...", it's rather a large area,
"...where you had a sense of standing on the planet."
Roden Crater is not open to the public yet.
I hope that I get to see it soon.
But here on the left is an image of the eye,
the so-called eye of the Roden Crater, another Skyspace,
quite a large one.
And of course, when we go back to the Pantheon,
we can see the similarities and the same fascination
that still exists with us.
And just to finish off, I wanted to include
a few more precedents of artists that work
in the sphere of art, science and technology
and cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, hybrid,
or, as they say at the media lab, anti-disciplinary.
There are so many words for it now.
This is an ex-professor of mine, Neri Oxman,
who's from the Mediated Matter Group.
Mediated Matter implies that in nature all matter
is mediated by its environment.
In other words, plants and animals must adapt to survive,
and Oxman believes that this concept applies
to art and design as well.
So, she's constantly trying to find these patterns
and adapt them to design, to art.
An example is the Silk Pavilion that was built in 2011
which studies how traditional ecology examines relationships
between living organisms and their environment.
Of course inspired by biomimicry as well.
And in the Silk Pavilion, there were thousands
upon thousands of silk worms
that would work at this cocoon for,
I think this took about three or four weeks
before they had the entire space covered,
to spin a 3-D cocoon
out of a single multi-property silk thread.
So, each silk worm has about a kilometer of silk.
The overall geometry of the pavilion was created
using an algorithm that assigns a single, continuous thread
across patches, providing various degrees of density.
Just some more images of the sort of work
that Neri is doing.
For me another hugely influential artist, Olafur Eliasson,
a Danish artist,
whose work focuses on natural phenomena,
and really someone who embraces this idea
of cross-disciplinary work.
But also what I find interesting about him
is he's reimagining the role of the artist
and also the idea of a studio.
He's created a lab for inter-disciplinary thought
and practice and has about 80 or 88 people working with him,
ranging from architects to gardeners,
to cooks, to painters.
And they all get together, they eat lunch together,
and they create together.
He does anything from commissions to museum shows to,
for example, his most famous piece
which is one of his earlier piece
called the "Weather Project",
which was at the Tate Modern,
which represented the sun and the sky in a turbine hole.
And mist was sprayed in the room,
and he used mono-frequency lamps
to emulate radiation from the sun.
And of course, it being London,
you can imagine how popular this was.
"Take Your Time", another piece.
And I think this is a good slide to end with.
This really sort of gives you a feeling
of what the "Weather Project" felt like.
People were just lying there for hours,
just looking at this light.
And it sort of, to me, said so much
about what art can achieve in a large space,
a small space, just by using light.
And I think, I'll leave it at that.
Thank you very much.
(applause)