Folded Cosmos: A Cultural Response to Contemporary Physics

Abstract

This is an artistic investigation into the implications for the imagination of certain counter-intuitive ideas in contemporary physics, resulting in a series of time-based works. Key concepts such as extra spatial dimensions (in string theory), curved space-time (general relativity), and non-locality and indeterminacy (quantum mechanics) contradict our intuitive sense of the space and time we inhabit, leading to a sense of dislocation and disorientation. It is the implications for the human imagination that comprise the central considerations of this inquiry, rather than the physical theories themselves.

Spatiality and indeterminacy considered from a subjective and therefore cultural perspective are the central themes of the finished works; no attempt is made to illustrate either physics or philosophy, presenting instead a sense of dislocated space per se. I have developed these works using programmable animation software, using a combination of visualisation techniques, stochastic processes and editing to produce the finished video and audio sequences.

The finished works are looped and have been approached more as time-based paintings than as cinema, or rather as time-based paintings borrowing certain cinematic tools as required in order to explore spatiality. Conversely, the works borrow from the language of geometric abstraction in painting to present this spatiality as one that is developed and extended from the projection surface itself.