→ wood, paper, string
Setup for a full breakfast in the half-space
View of the exhibition: ODNI/UDO (Objet Domestique Non Identifié / Unidentified Domestic Object), La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse
Excerpt from Sometimes Art
(…) Just as we’ve come to dream of falling from skyscrapers, we now carry vivid internal images of fields and particles that were shaped by animations, diagrams, and screens. These visual tools often give us a two-dimensional, schematic representation of something we cannot directly perceive. While they are helpful and serve their purpose, they frequently remain simple graphical abstractions. We are rarely able to translate these abstractions literally into our three- or four-dimensional physical world. Clearly, giving an image to something which has none must be done indirectly, through available tools.
Since this topic of magnetism is not intuitive, I must be aware that the images I carry in my mind all have a source and arrive mostly outside traditional education. Alongside the classical images of magnetic fields, there is an image that stays etched in my mind. It is a colourful animation created by Derek B. Leinweber, showing the gluon fluctuations in a vacuum. This animation was featured in Prof. Frank Wilczek’s 2004 Nobel Prize Lecture, and I must have seen it for the first time not long after that.
The effect of seeing this image was simple and obvious: Is there really no such thing as empty space? What else is hidden in there? And, if one were to take a 20-centimetre cube of space and dissect it in all possible ways, what would one find in there?
For many years, I have held this fictive cube of “nothing” next to me, thinking about what fills it and what it conceals. When I observe it, I imagine a colourful mass of lines and dots, without a clear distinction between different phenomena. Sometimes, I wish to squish it, right before it collapses into a black hole, or count the microscopic elements which I presume I would know to name. More abstract phenomena – particles, waves, and fields always remain lines or points, without a distinct image or name to assign to them.
Now, I wonder how closely those images in my mind match reality. Could I give them a more distinct form, and is it even necessary to do so? (..)
