Nature of Neptune

The Way Things Go

Peter Fischli and David Weiss's 1987 film, The Way Things Go, has become a classic art film, still shown in contemporary art museums around the world.  The Swiss artist's timeless work, which documents a thirty minute long chain reaction using commonly found objects, is still as fascinating to watch today as it was twenty years ago.

The chain reaction was set up in a large warehouse room, and includes objects like tires, planks, water, gasoline, candles, and fuses.  The clip above shows a segment of the film especially devoted to fire and pyrotechnics.  There is no mystery to the work; the artists do a fantastic job of breaking down physical phenomena into simple, mesmerizing steps.  It is an exercise in ways to transfer energy between different objects and systems.

The real genius of The Way Things Go is its timing.  The reactions are paced in a way that makes clear what is happening at each step, but also has a spellbinding rhythm in which objects speed up, slow down, and build into each other.  This fastidious pacing is what sets this piece apart from a mechanical assembly line, or many Rube Goldberg contraptions.  This use of time scale calls to mind the kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson, and perhaps Ganson was influenced by Fischli and Weiss.

Measuring Reality: Spencer Finch's Light Installations

As a philosophy, the scientific method holds one axiom above all others: objectivity.  Unbiased observation of measurable evidence forms the basis for reproducible experiments that seek to uncover fundamental truths about nature.  The objectivity of this method has helped push the frontiers of our knowledge to incredible limits.

However, the proliferation and success of the scientific method has led us to sometimes assume that objectivity equals truth.  Artist Spencer Finch demonstrates the precariousness of this assumption through large scale, thought-provoking installations.  In these installations, Finch takes of careful, studied observations of certain characteristics of scene, such as hue and luminosity of light, and recreates them in a new context.

Recently exhibited at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, CIE 529/418 (Candlelight) consists of an entire wall of stained glass windows that reproduce the exact same color profile as candlelight (photo by srdaly11).  Finch used a colorimeter to precisely measure the RGB values of the light eight inches from a burning candle.  The room is beautiful and hypnotizing to stand in, and asks the viewer how similar and how different the experience really is to the illumination from a room full of candles.  He has broken candlelight into window panes of different color that vary in luminosity with the strength of the sunlight.  If the light in the room is precisely the same hue as the light from a candle, is it the same light?  Finch shows how important context is to the meaning of objective measurements.

The photo to the right is of another piece by Finch that uses similar ideas as Candlelight (photo by Spor).  This piece, called Shade (At the Grave of Walt Whitman, October 19, 2006, 10:15 am), recreates the hue and luminosity of the light at an exact place and an exact time.  Again, Finch is asking the viewer what exactly these objective measurements have to do with the emotions and feelings associated with a scene.  Is any emotion conveyed?  And if so, is it due to the precise measurement of light, or to the stylistic way Finch has broken the light up into overlapping colored ovals?

The MASS MoCA restrospective also included the piece to the left, called Night Sky, Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 9, 2004 (photo from Finch's website).  In this installation, Finch mixed colors of pigment to achieve the precise hue of the sky described in the title.  He then created light bulb models of each of the pigment's molecular structures.  By hanging these from the ceiling, Finch compares the hanging lights to the way the actual sky would have looked.  In doing so, he asks how well scientific models can recreate reality.  The beautiful installation does seem to convey a sense of the original Arizona night sky, but only to a point.  The piece occupies a middle ground between abstracted concepts and recreating an actual scene, asking the viewer how closely objective measurement really brings us to the truth.

Read more about Finch's work in the Boston Globe and the New York Times.

Sex, Food, and Shit: The Art of Wim Delvoye

As controversial as he is clever, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has received broad critical acclaim, as well as public outrage, for projects that have included tattooing pigs or selling machine-made feces.  Bent on undermining common conceptions about what it means to be "human," Delvoye has utilized several imaging methods and concepts from science to drive his points home.

Controversial as they may be, Delvoye's projects go far beyond simple shock value.  The image on the left shows an example from his Chapel series, which consists of a number of x-ray and stained glass combinations that were installed in a gothic chapel.  He obtained the images by taking x-rays of two friends in various stages of love-making. This window, called Erato, tiles images of the same scene taken (or processed) at different x-ray opacities.

In this piece, Delvoye uses the cold, but beautiful, objectivity of x-ray imagery to "see through" one of humanity's most cherished acts, the kiss.  By presenting such sterilized views of such an intimate act, he suggests that despite any emotional or physical beauty and complexity, it all boils down to primitive activity among two bone and organ-filled organisms.  While Slow Moving Photon astutely proposes that the series may offer the possibility of "diagnosing true love," I see the beautiful stained glass windows as more of a cynical take on acts (kissing, loving) that we cherish as defining aspects of humanity.  In other parts of the Chapel series, Delvoye creates beautiful patterns from x-rays of skulls, teeth, and intestines, showing that underneath the human mystique lie the simple biological activities of sex, food, and shit.

While not directly about science, Delvoye's Chapel series (as well as his Cloaca project) uses scientific knowledge to show different ways of thinking about the human body.   In an age where we have discovered that we may share up to 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, Delvoye suggests that human activity may be no different than that of other life forms.

Image from Delvoye's website.  See more images here.

The OneTrees Project

Genetics research in the past half century has unquestionably revolutionized the field of biology, as well as humanity's concepts of life and individuality.  Years of research have led to remarkable scientific achievements, such as genetic engineering, cloning, and the Human Genome Project.  The discovery of genes that "cause" many physical and mental attributes, ranging from height and eye color to intelligence and sexuality, has had a dramatic impact on our views of individuality.  There seem to be genes for everything; patterns of chemicals that determine who we are and how we act.

However, as many biologists will tell you, environmental factors also play an extremely important role in determining the attributes of a living creature.  This is a fact that seems to be largely overlooked or underrated by many people today, scientists and non-scientists alike. 

Artist Natalie Jeremijenko's OneTrees project cleverly undermines the idea that genes and DNA solely determine individuality.  The OneTrees project consists of dozens of cloned walnut trees planted in different locations around the San Francisco Bay Area.  The trees are all planted in public places, allowing anyone with knowledge of the project to make their own observations about why each of these genetically identical trees have grown to look far different from one another.  How do the trees vary in terms of their physical locations?  In terms of the cultural and economic differences between the people who care for them?  The metaphor for human lives is thinly veiled.

The OneTrees project is clearly a huge logistical undertaking, but is based on an incredibly simple idea.  It brings the concepts of genetics and cloning into the public space (literally), and shows viewers a simplified context to see for themselves the complex interplay between genetics and external environments that shape all living creatures, including our own bodies and minds.

Watch a feature on Jeremijenko and the project on Spark, and read Seed Magazine's recent interview with Jeremijenko and physicist Lawrence Krauss.  The photo of the cloned seedlings is from the MIT Press, the picture of the tree in front of a Bay Area factory is from a San Francisco Chronicle article and was taken by Lea Suzuki, and the last photo is from a OneTrees exhibit at the Pond gallery, showing striking differences between the leaves of four different clones.

Andy Goldsworthy and his use of time scale

Andy Goldsworthy was that kid who loved to play in streams and forests for hours and hours.  Lucky for us, the world-renowned British artist never grew out of it.

Much has been written about Goldsworthy's breathtaking nature-based sculptures and outdoor installations, but I would like to draw specific attention to the temporal aspects of his work.  I discussed the notion of "time scale" in artwork in reference to Arthur Ganson's sculptures, and Goldsworthy puts this concept to use better than anyone I have ever seen.  With his outdoor installations, Goldsworthy builds structures out of natural local materials and then gives them up to the environment.  This method allows him to explore the transience of both natural materials and environmental cycles at the same time.  The pieces are created specifically to "decay" in a way that will expose underlying features of the local environment.

The clip above, from the essential film documentary of Goldsworthy's work, Rivers and Tides, provides a perfect example of this transience.  Ever so slowly, the log structure he builds becomes surrounded and then lifted by the rising tide of the ocean.  The structure spins according to the water flow around it, and slowly loses its logs as it is carried out into open water. 

Everybody knows what tides are, and it is no mystery as to when they occur.  What Goldsworthy has done here is draw attention to the time scale it takes for the tide to act on the environment.  It is a slow, meditative pace, but steady and inevitable.  This piece, and others, make you aware of the intrinsic cycles in our environments, such as ebbs and flows, sunlight and darkness, freezing and melting, etc.  Many of these cycles occur in extremely quick or imperceptibly slow time scales, that we, as humans, rarely notice.  Goldsworthy brings them to our attention, subjectively.  Cycles between order and entropy, and life and death, are absolutely intrinsic not only to the environment, but to each of our lives.

The videos below show more film clips of his creations.  In his profound curiosity of the natural world, Goldsworthy speaks for both artists and scientists at the same time:

“You feel as if you’ve touched the heart of a place.  That’s a way of understanding; seeing something you never saw before, that was always there, but you were blind to it.”