Nature of Neptune

Anne Lilly's Purity of Motion

In the history of science, images and words have dominated the way concepts are conveyed to colleagues, students, and the public.  Books, prints, photographs, graphs, and diagrams have been the easiest way to portray profound ideas in scientific disciplines for centuries. 

What can often fall by the wayside in science education is how things move.  In science we see dazzling images of swirling galaxies, intricate cells, and dashing animals, but it is very hard to get a sense of the real motion of these objects.  What causes different types of motion?  Why do objects move the way they do?  Why do some movements seem graceful while others appear clunky?  And most importantly, rather than conceptualizing the motion of an object, how does the motion relate to our own bodies?

Artist Anne Lilly builds exquisite stainless steel sculptures that directly explore these issues of motion.  The pieces created by the Boston-based artist (and friend of Arthur Ganson) are propelled by the viewer's hand, giving a direct cause and effect experience for each viewer.  Once set in motion, Lilly's sculptures demonstrate how beautiful and simple motion can arise from simple rules of physics and mechanics.  While Newton's laws describe how objects move, Lilly's sculptures describe how these motions can appear to a human observer.  In her piece Parietals (see a video here), Lilly uses conservation of angular momentum to beautifully transform steel rods into both a science demonstration as well as a mesmerizing display of pure, graceful motion.  By presenting a graceful motion in such a simple way, the artist allows the viewer to contemplate each moment of cause and effect that causes the motion.

Because the motion in Lilly's sculptures is so simple and so pure, it is not hard to relate it to motion found in nature.  In her recent series of spinning steel rod pieces, specifically "There's a Certain Slant of Light", "Polaris", and "Parting" (click each to see a video), the motion of emergent flocking is suggested, such as the mesmerizing movement of starling flocks (also see Richard Barnes' photographs of the same subject).  The long, thin rods in Lilly's sculptures appear to move independently one moment, and then form a coherent motion the next.  They expand and contract, cohere and dissolve, much like many forms of natural flocking.

On another level, the same series of sculptures call to mind electrons swirling around an atomic nucleus.  Lilly's pieces are specifically geared so that none of the rods will ever touch another, which strongly parallels the Pauli exclusion principle forbidding any two electrons from simultaneously occupying the same quantum state.  In quantum theory, the enormous empty space surrounding an atomic nucleus is filled by a cloud of electrons that never "touch".  While the exact paths of the electrons can never be known (see the Heisenberg uncertaintly principle), the regions that they are most likely to be found can form very interesting geometric shapes.  Lilly's sculptures seem to provide an impossible view of how electrons would move through their probability regions if we could actually follow their individual motions.  Always surrounding an invisible nucleus, they never touch, sometimes appear random, but nonetheless form coherent patterns from simple underlying principles.  Form is created not by objects or images, but by pure motion itself.

All images and videos are from Anne Lilly's personal website, and the Arden Gallery website.

Vigorous Simplicity: Conrad Shawcross's Spinning Machines

Though they approach the question differently, both scientists and artists have long been concerned with the relationship between the simple and the complex.  Scientists strive to find simple, elegant mechanisms and equations that describe the complexity seen on our planet and the universe beyond, while many artists explore the ways that simple forms can create complex emotions, or how complex patterns and designs can cohere into unified visions.

English sculptor Conrad Shawcross addresses this age-old concern with a series of intriguing light-based kinetic sculptures.  One set of pieces, called Loop System Quintet, consists of five large wooden contraptions that rotate around their base, and each hold an arm with a bright light attached that spins independently of the base.  The effect is a long row of complex and intimidating wooden machines that trace elegant patterns of light in the air at an unnervingly fast speed.  Shawcross has determined the motion of these machines using specially chosen gear ratios, resulting in movements that continue to repeat themselves.

The jarring speed of these complex contraptions convey the vigor of some unfathomable industrial machinery, while also clearly showing the rigor of a carefully planned, and ultimately simple, repeating process.  The work brings to mind several topics from contemporary science.  As the artist himself admits, the sculptures reference string theory by the way they repeat their motions in "harmonic" patterns, creating three dimensional light traces from a one dimensional point of light (string theory proposes that all physical particles in the universe are actually created by strings that vibrate at different resonant frequencies - like the specific notes created by plucking a guitar string).  Shawcross' use of harmonics is intriguing in the way his machines seem complex but continue to follow very elegant lines of motion.  However, the beautiful long exposure photographs of the three dimensional light traces (shown above) are not actually visible when viewing the sculpture.

What can be seen watching the sculptures is how the path of the light changes from moment to moment.  The simplicity of this motion contrasted with the almost ugly jerkiness of the machines calls to mind the elegant motions of the planets, the paths of electrons around nuclei, or the dance between a binary stars.  Rather than show the simplicity in a complex system, as scientists strive for, Shawcross explores the complexity behind simple systems.  By using complex wooden machinery to create simple harmonic forms, the artist suggests that there may be more layers below the surface of simple forms and motions.  And yet, the complexity of Shawcross' machinery is ultimately deterministic -- the forms repeat themselves; nothing is left to chance.  This is another aspect where the piece does not successfully address the quantum nature of string theory, but still stands up to larger scale metaphors such as planetary motion.

The photo above was taken by Jonathan Shaw, and can be found at London's Walker Art Gallery website.  See more about Shawcross' work at Pixelsumo.

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.

Kinetic Sculptures of Arthur Ganson

Another artist who combines sculpture with mechanical subtleties is Arthur Ganson.  Ganson, who lives right here in Somerville, Massachusetts (so I've been told), creates sculptures that combine complex gear and pulley systems with mundane everyday objects, and are driven by a single motor.  This great little video shows a couple of them:

There are a lot of things going on in each of Ganson's sculptures, both literally and figuratively.  By using simple mechanical techniques in surprising ways, Ganson's work hides nothing from the viewer, much like the construction of Theo Jansen's Strandbeests.  Ganson's sculptures compound these simple operations into a complex chain that can be followed, with some concentration, by the eye.  He draws attention to the beautiful simplicity of these mechanical motions by linking the system to a simple object, such as a wishbone, artichoke leaf, or plastic cocktail sword.  The system causes the object to move in an interesting and often anthropomorphic manner, forcing the viewer to compare these mechanical motions to those of a real living object. 

The wry philosophical implications of several of his sculptures are amusing, but what I like best about these pieces are their exquisite use of time scale.  I say "time scale" rather than simply "timing", because there is more to the rhythm of the sculptures than the fact that all the motion is coordinated.  Note in the first part of the video above, Cory's Yellow Chair, how the chair pieces break away quickly, slow down at the apex of the turn, and then accelerate back into place.  Also of note is the perfectly trudging pace of the wishbone in the video below.  By perfectly manipulating the pace of the mechanical movements, Ganson makes the viewer look for the exact mechanical subtleties that produce these movements.  He makes you especially curious about what is causing these elegant movements.  Unfortunately, to get a really good sense of how these movements are being created by all the gears and pulleys, you need to see the sculptures in person and take your time with each.  But by using elegant rhythms and the anthropomorphized objects, Ganson allows the viewer to understand these mechanical movements in a way that he or she can relate to on a personal level.

A number of Ganson's sculptures are on permanent exhibit in the fantastic MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  In this exhibit, all sculptures are activated by a museum visitor stepping on a big button on the floor in front of each sculpture.  This includes my favorite, Cocktail Swords, which consists of spinning metal arms branching off of each other at right angles and becoming consecutively smaller.  The spinning motions are caused solely by friction gears of the arm segments rubbing against each other.  The smallest arms each hold a red cocktail sword as they spin through the air, looking like a perplexingly logical drunken pirate.

Theo Jansen's Strandbeests

Theo Jansen is a dutch sculptor who builds enormous, (mostly) self-propelled, walking creature/machines.  The pieces in his series Strandbeest are made out of yellow plastic tubing, and move uncannily like living beings.  Check out this (albeit slightly cheesy) YouTube video to get a look at the Strandbeests in motion:

Jansen's sculptures take beautifully simple engineering tactics to a stunningly powerful conceptual level.  As you can see in the simulation below, the "legs" are powered only by a rotating wheel in the center of the creature.  Many of his more recent pieces sport sails, allowing the wind to power their movement.  Jansen lets them loose on large windy beaches to roam at their will.

Jansen's work asks us where the line between animal and machine lies.  Are animals not just complex machines that act on external stimuli, just as his Strandbeests are powered by the wind?  When released onto a windy beach the sculptures are beautiful to watch, allowing viewers to contemplate their nature on a natural time scale.  There are no modern tricks behind the sculptures, no computers, no electricity even.  Cars, for example, move on their own too, but when we see one driving down a street, can we actually comprehend the process that makes it drive like it does?  Can we relate to it?  Jansen's sculptures lay bare the mechanics of life, showing how a force as common as wind can power such beautiful creatures.  This is something that we, as humans, can actually relate to.

See another interesting video in which Jansen talks about his sculptures and how he builds them.   Wired asks robotics designers what they think if Jansen's work, and Urban-ism discusses what Strandbeest means to the field of design.