Issuu

EDITION 02 : ASTROPHYSICS

SCIENCE EDITORS 002 |

Professor Chris Fluke Dr Fluke is the SmartSat Cooperative Research Centre’s Professorial Chair in space system real-time data fusion, integration, and cognition at Swinburne University of Technology. He was also the foundation director of Swinburne’s Advanced Visualisation Laboratory. His primary research interests are in the use of advanced visualisation (hardware and software) to accelerate discovery in datadriven contexts, with an emphasis on data-intensive challenges of next-generation petabyte and exabyte-scale astronomy projects. Aln experienced science communicator and arts-science collaborator, he has worked with choreographers, painters, photographers, and performance artists. He is also a Board Member with the Australian Network for Art, Science, and Technology.

Professor Amaury Triaud Dr Triaud is a Professor of Exoplanetology at the University of Birmingham. He completed his PhD in 2011 at the University of Geneva, under the guidance of Professor Didier Queloz, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019 for his co-discovery of the first exoplanet. In the course of this own research, Triaud codiscovered TRAPPIST-1, a system of seven temperate Earth-sized planets, which is currently the most optimal to search for evidence of extraterrestrial biology. He has also collaborated with writers, dancers, film-makers, visual artists, and musicians for over a decade. www.amaurytriaud.net

Dr Pippa Cole Dr Cole is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. She holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a PhD in cosmology. She specialises in black holes, dark matter and gravitational waves, and is currently working on modelling black hole binary mergers in exotic environments, as well as prospects for detecting them with future space-based gravitational wave detectors. She is also a freelance science writer for the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

Dr Alastair Gunn Dr Gunn is an astrophysicist and science writer at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, University of Manchester. He is Associate Editor of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Astronomy & Geophysics magazine, astronomy news editor for iCandi’s Night Sky App, columnist for BBC Science Focus magazine, and regular contributor to science media outlets such as Astronomy Now, StarDate, Astronomy Café and BBC Sky at Night magazine. He has also written for The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Guardian. His fiction includes Ballymoon, a collection of supernatural stories, and his debut novel, The Bergamese Sect, a conspiracy thriller.

Dr Thomas Haworth Dr Haworth holds a PhD from the University of Exeter, where he worked on radiation hydrodynamics and radiation transport simulations of star forming regions. He took a postdoctoral research position at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge to work on the radiation driven dispersal of planet forming discs. Currently an independent research fellow at Imperial College London, he holds a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship and is a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, working on a range of topics in star and planet formation. https://thaworth.wixsite.com/astro

Dr Abigail Frost Dr Frost is a postdoctoral researcher whose work focuses on the origin and behaviour of massive stars. In addition to her research, Dr Frost is passionate about outreach, mentoring and equality, diversity and inclusion. She is an active member of the organisation Astronomers for Planet Earth, which seeks to mobilise the astronomy community against the threat of climate change, and she cofounded the IDEEA network with Dr Gabriele Betancourt-Martinez.

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CONTENTS

010

FEATURE

Cover Artist | Does AI Dream of Electric Sheep? Refik Anadol

032

FEATURE

Interview | The Beige Universe Katie Paterson

050 066 078

Interview | Celestial Motion Alexander Whitley

FEATURE

Commission Interview | Cosmic Field David Rickard and Bill Chaplin

SCREEN ARTS

Article | A Screen Odyssey Greg Jamieson

088 110

FEATURE

SCREEN ARTS

Interview | A Lonely Space Tristan Myles, David Saltzberg, and Ian Bell

CULINARY ARTS

Article | Ground Control to Maître D’ Kate Tighe

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120 138

Article | Shape and Space Herbert Wright

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

Interview | Imagination at its Edges Melodie Yashar, Robert J Lang, Anastasia Prosina, Anna Talvi, and Neil Leach

LITERARY ARTS

Article | Astropoetics Laura González Salmerón

186 204

LITERARY ARTS

Interview | Ice for the First Time Alan Lightman, Pippa Goldschmidt, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, and Sunayana Bhargava

MUSIC AND SOUND

Article | Musica Universalis Michael Mroz

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Interview | The Taste of Stars Nicole Stott, Roberto Trotta, and Quentin Vicas

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

152 174

CULINARY ARTS

MUSIC AND SOUND

Interview | Sound and Silence Matt Russo, Nicole Huillier, Mario Livio, and Paola Prestini

234

THEATRE AND DANCE

Article | To Know Otherwise Felipe Cervera

246 260

Interview | Spooky Acting at a Distance Kathy Romer, Kurt Vanhoutte, Alex Kelly, and Krister Shalm

VISUAL FINE ARTS

Article | Mirroring Infinity Paul Carey-Kent

270 290

THEATRE AND DANCE

VISUAL FINE ARTS

Interview | Touching the Deep Field Caroline Corbasson

TECHNICAL ARTICLE

How do creative disciplines and crossover projects further astrophysics research? How might they in future? Chris Fluke, Alastair Gunn, Pippa Cole, Abigail Frost, and Tom Haworth

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02 STUDIO LAB

All Categories

NOTES

References

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FINAL THOUGHT

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DOES

AI DREAM OF

ELECTRIC

SHEEP? COVER ARTIST INTERVIEW

Refik Anadol Media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence, Refik Anadol owns and operates Refik Anadol Studio and RAS LAB, the Studio’s research practice centered around discovering and developing trailblazing approaches to data narratives and artificial intelligence. He is also a lecturer for the Department of Design Media Arts, UCLA, from which he obtained his MFA. His global projects have received awards and prizes including the Lorenzo il Magnifico Lifetime Achievement Award for New Media Art, Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, iF Gold Award, D&AD Pencil Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, Columbia University’s Breakthrough in Storytelling Award, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Award, SEGD Global Design Award, and Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award. Anadol has also developed site-specific audio/visual performances, which have been featured at iconic landmarks, museums, and festivals worldwide, such as the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the National Gallery of Victoria, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Hammer Museum, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Artechouse, The Centre Pompidou, The Portland Building, Daejeon Museum of Art, Florence Biennale, Art Basel, OFFF Festival, International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal, Ars Electronica Festival, l’Usine | Genève, Arc De Triomf, Zollverein | SANAA’s School of Design Building, santralistanbul Contemporary Art Center, Outdoor Vision Festival, Istanbul Design Biennial, Sydney City Art, and Lichtrouten, among many others. To apply the latest, cutting-edge science, research and technologies to his trailblazing work, Anadol has also partnered with teams at Microsoft, Google (Artist and Machine Intelligence), Panasonic, Nvidia, JPL/NASA, Intel, IBM, Siemens, Epson, MIT, UCLA, Stanford University, and UCSF.

012 | Machine Memoirs, 2021 by Refik Anadol Studio © Refik Anadol Studio

What is it like in outer space? The question has always had a compelling appeal and it accounts for some, at least, of the timeless fascination with astronomy and the allure of science fiction. It may well be that the most readily available and artistically satisfying answer to that question is delivered by Refik Anadol’s Machine Memoirs: Space, for which he collaborated with NASA and utilised artificial intelligence (AI) to make a series of ‘data paintings’ out of some four million images. They feed into an immersive cinema installation in which the photographic space archives become a latent cosmos. Alastair Gunn spoke to the digital media artist about the inspirations behind his art, including algorithms, machine intelligence, collaboration, and the collective human memory that is space exploration. The results amount to a new form of storytelling with the same underlying purpose as the old forms: to connect with our inner being – our souls. Douglas Adams once wrote, jocularly, that ‘the function of art is to hold a mirror up to nature … [but] there simply isn’t a mirror big enough’ (Adams, 1979). This statement could also, arguably, be a working definition of science, and particularly of astronomy. The two disciplines are intricately linked as basic expressions of human curiosity, ingenuity, and invention – traits evident in the inspiring digital artworks of Refik Anadol. Born in Turkey in 1985, but now based in Los Angeles, Anadol holds two master’s degrees in digital arts, is a lecturer and visiting researcher at UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts, and is the recipient of a coveted Google artist-inresidence award. He refers to his work as ‘data sculpture’ or ‘data painting’, regarding himself as much a computer scientist or AI engineer as an artist. However we choose to label it, Anadol’s work is unfettered by traditional materials or methods, exploring creative realms that exist only as tiny impulses rushing through silicon, visualised in staggering light.

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Acting as a collaborator with machine intelligence, Anadol describes his process as ‘dipping my brush into data universes’. He makes algorithms that recall memories, hallucinations or dreams, in many ways offering the audience an answer to the question from Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (famously adapted as the film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott, 1982). Anadol explores the synergies between art, technology and science and asks fundamental questions about the nature of information, knowledge, perception and consciousness. Indeed, the Refik Anadol Studio (RAS), comprising a large retinue of artists, musicians, programmers, and architects, harbours its own AI research laboratory with links to external academic researchers.

- Refik Anadol

‘The machine becomes merely a thinking brush’ 014 |

How did he arrive at this combination of interests? Growing up, he says, ‘I was addicted to video games, but not only as an experience of playing, but I think as kind of an escapism – escaping to another space, escaping in the mind of the machine, or escaping to environments that don’t exist.’ That, as art often does, related to the desire to ‘shift the reality to something else’. Add an interest in computer graphics to a child’s natural inclination to draw, and how ‘over the years I was inspired by photography, videography, editing – in two and three dimensions’ and Anadol grew up with ‘all the disciplines on top of each other naturally. And I’ve found that they are all connected.’

Anadol’s early ideas on the nebulous boundary between art and science were heavily influenced by the work of Peter Weibel, a renowned post-conceptual artist at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, and his research on digital society at the Ars Electronica institute in Linz, Austria. Anadol says that his colleagues and mentors at UCLA, especially media artist Victoria Vesna, cemented his approach; ‘Victoria was constantly looking for patterns in nature, in life,’ explains Anadol, ‘and that’s how I started the idea of using AI as an intelligent being able to contribute to the creation of art.’

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Refik Anadol, photo by Efsun Erkılıç

Machine Memoirs, 2021. Render by Refik Anadol Studio © Refik Anadol Studio

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Of course, this begs the question of attribution – whether the human or the machine is the artist. Traditionally, only the human mind has been regarded as fully conscious, and thus able to comprehend the complex (and often abstract) processes of artistic creation; abilities that machines simply don’t possess (Holland, 2003). The concept of such a human-machine hierarchy has, however, decayed in recent years – in many advanced digital arts the object and subject have essentially become ambiguous (Benedikter, 2021). Anadol, however, is adamant that his creative process is ultimately curated and controlled by the human mind – he is the artist; ‘I instruct the machine how to think so it becomes merely a thinking brush’. If the machine is the ‘brush’, then, Anadol declares, the data are his ‘pigment’. The datasets, whether they are something as simple as a series of rainfall measurements, or as complex as a library of millions of photographic images, are intrinsic to the artwork. The data are lost in the art, but only so far as individual pigments are hidden in the complexities of brush strokes. Anadol explains: ‘I never get inspired by the idea of a recoverable data visualisation; I don’t believe that’s art, that’s just pure design, just data as a functional experience of information that needs clarification.’ What Anadol is trying to imagine is what happens if the drivers are ‘life and nature itself: for example patterns of temperature or gusts or air quality; or Wi-Fi, 5G signals or social media data; or even a heart rate or brain signal. ‘I don’t see any limit in my practice: for me any data can become pigment.’ He aims to use the data ‘as a dramatic tool to completely change and give a new meaning’, and often finds that is facilitated through talking to the people who are collecting the data. He mentions that how every meeting with NASA-JPL engineers was ‘just remarkable. So I got mentally inspired from these people’s incredible journey of understanding the unknown for humanity … I believe space and nature and time are collective memories of humanity: and I do believe they belong to everyone.’

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BEIGE

UNIVERSE

Katie Paterson Katie Paterson is an artist whose work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos. She holds a BA from Edinburgh College of Art, an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, and is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh.

Steve Fossey Dr Fossey is currently Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London. He is also a long time collaborator on several of Paterson’s works.

Approximately half of Katie Paterson’s art is inspired by outer space, and it’s obvious that she brings a considerable rigour to the work. For Katie, it’s not enough to imagine how things might be; she really cares about being as exact as possible. ‘When I come up with my ideas in the first place’, says Katie, ‘I realise there will be complexity, but I don’t know what it will be’. This thorough approach means that she needs to collaborate with astrophysicists, and she has worked frequently with Dr Steve Fossey (Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at University College London). I talked to Katie and Steve about the interface of astrophysics and art. We concentrated on four projects, covering the history of the universe in light, interplanetary time, the scents of outer space, and nearly every known Solar Eclipse. While we’ve chosen to focus on these pieces, we might equally have considered Katie’s work on sending a meteorite back into space (201214), recreating moonlight (2008), the brightest-ever explosions (2011),

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or commemorating the death of stars (2011-present). For Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky (2012–14), a meteorite was cast, melted, re-cast into a new form, and then returned to space by the European Space Agency (Paterson, 2012-14) Light bulb to Simulate Moonlight (2008) applied the spectral measurements of moonlight to the creation of a light bulb, whereas for 100 Billion Suns (2011) the 3,126 known gamma-ray bursts in the Universe (which can burn 100 billion times brighter than our sun) were reduced to 3,216 pieces of appropriately coloured paper to be fired from a confetti cannon (citn). The Dying Star Letters (2011- ongoing) sees Katie writing letters to inform scientists upon hearing the news that a star has died, as some do each week (Cervera, 2017). Indeed, Katie has so many ideas that she has taken to making Sterling Silver wall texts of what could be – practicalities aside - possible works. For example, ‘objects coated in gold extracted from shooting stars’, ‘a place that exists only in moonlight’, and ‘the universe rewound and played back in real time’ (from Ideas (2015-ongoing).

The Cosmic Spectrum, 2019. Exhibition view Turner Contemporary, 2019 Supported by the Arts Council England. Photo © Manu Palomeque.

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CELESTIAL

MOTION

Alexander Whitley Alexander Whitely is a choreographer, contemporary dancer, and artistic director with a bold interdisciplinary approach. He trained at the Royal Ballet School and began his career at Birmingham Royal Ballet before moving into contemporary dance, working with companies including Michael Clarke Company, Sydney Dance Company, and Wayne McGregor Random Dance. Whitley is currently a New Wave Associate at Sadler’s Wells theatre, a former associate of Rambert and the Royal Ballet, and a member of New Movement Collective. He is also an Artist Fellow at Queen Mary University, London, and a tutor on the Design for Performance and Interaction Masters Programme at The Bartlett School of Architexutre, UCL.

Alexander Whitley, a New Wave Associate Artist at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, is a new breed of choreographer exploring the intersection of science and the interpretative arts. Having trained at the Royal Ballet School, Alexander soon moved into contemporary dance, developing a reputation for bold and innovative collaborations across diverse art forms. He has created work for leading dance companies including the Royal Ballet, Rambert, Balletboyz, Candoco, and Birmingham Royal Ballet. His choreography has won him nominations for the 2012 Arts Foundation fellowship, the 2014 Sky Arts Southbank Awards, and the 2015 Critics’ Circle Awards. In his production titled 8 Minutes, Alexander takes inspiration from solar science, working with researcher Dr Hugh Mortimer of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The performance, premiered in 2017, takes its name from the time taken for the sun’s light to reach Earth. Combined with a score by electroacoustic composer, Daniel Wohl, and stunning imagery by visual artist, Tal Rosner, the piece explores our relationship with the sun and the forces at work in the universe – all to a backdrop of scientific data. Working with The Guardian’s award-winning Virtual Reality department, Alexander recently took the concept of 8 Minutes one step further. Celestial Motion, filmed with motion capture technology, explores movement across human and astronomical scales in a virtual reality environment. By combining scientific data (primarily from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory) with all three elements of the performance (dance, visuals, and music), 8 Minutes explores the fundamental connection of humans to the life-giving empyrean light. But, for Hugh Mortimer, who has collaborated widely on creative projects, including Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and with artist, Elizabeth Price, 8 Minutes highlights for him the parallels between science and art. ‘The scientific method is almost exactly the same as the artistic process’, he said, ‘both are a means to test hypotheses through the use of research and experimentation to further human knowledge and understanding’ (Karouzos and Chiao, 2017).

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image caption 7 pt

8 Minutes, 2017, by Alexander Whitley Dance Company. Photo by Johan Persson | 053

SCREEN ARTS

Greg Jamieson

A SCREEN ODYSSEY 078 |

Picture a spaceship. You might be thinking of the sleek, cylindrical forms of NASA’s rockets, the Meccano outline of a lunar lander, or the solar-panelled wingspan of the International Space Station. It is, however, equally possible that you might have conjured up these images; bright, octagonal corridors, as seen in the Discovery One of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); industrial grime, as seen in The Nostromo, populated by the unfortunate crew of Alien (1979); or the grungy squalor of Starbug, as piloted by the hapless survivors of Red Dwarf (1988). Film, television, and video games have all had significant cultural impact on the ways in which we imagine space. Through exploring a historical context for modern day screen media, we will discuss how astrophysics research influences technical developments in special effects, CGI, and programming, and, conversely, the ways in which innovative screen arts flow back into academic astrophysics. Have exchanges between these two fields been, not solely aesthetic, but also enduring and meaningful – and where might they boldly go? In comparison to other artforms, the screen arts might be considered relatively youthful; the first use of the word ‘television’ was in 1900 (El-Hajjar and Hanzo, 2013); the first regular broadcasts to electronic TV systems appeared in the 1930s (ibid.); and the first commercial videogame to be mass-produced only hit the market in 1971 (Vaughan-Nichols, 2009). Groundwork for these technologies was, however, laid in before the nineteenth century, with historical precursors to modern film technology traceable back to the Victorians – and appear, perhaps surprisingly, to intersect with the Victorian and Edwardian interests in telescopes. The

‘Disney house a prosperous

development programme’

Victorian era is, perhaps deservedly, recognised as a time of great technological innovation and invention: industrialisation and new methods of manufacture drove the creation of fantastical new contraptions powered by clockwork and steam (e.g. Rochford, 2014; Robinson, 2015). Given that ‘[a]stronomy is a science driven by innovations in instrumentation’ (Lankford, 2013, p. xiii), it is, maybe, unsurprising that telescopes, and hence astrophysics, also benefitted during the period. While some of the very first technologies that attempted to depict a moving image relied on the way that the human brain processes pictures that are rotating (i.e. the ‘stroboscopic’ animation of the colourfully-named ‘phénakisticope’, ‘praxinoscope’, and ‘zoetrope’ (Enticknap, 2005; Woodcock et al., 2009; Stampfer and Blower, 2016)), the first media we might recognise as ‘motion pictures’ arrived in the 1880s, enabled by the advent of celluloid photographic film and cameras, which could capture sequences of images in rapid succession (Parkinson, 2012; Dixon and Foster, 2018). These innovations allowed for ‘reels’ of film to be captured, and then viewed – either individually, on a device such as a ‘kinetoscope’ (Dixon and Foster, 2018) – or as a group experience, enabled by projection (ibid.). Indeed, early film cameras relied upon the same precise techniques employed in manufacturing the mirrors and lenses which underpinned the cutting-edge telescopes of the time (see: Wall, 2018). Indeed, some manufacturers at the end of the nineteenth century catered for both audiences; Henry Fitz, the first manufacturer of refractors for telescopes in nineteenth century America, began his career by making optical mirrors for the first ‘daguerreotype’ portrait cameras (Launie, 2009).

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A LONELY

SPACE David Saltzberg Dr Saltzberg is currently a Professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, whose research focus is tiny particles. For twelve years he was also the science consultant on comedy show The Big Bang Theory, and then on the spin-off sitcom Young Sheldon. Saltzberg’s professional focus is tiny particles. Previously, he has worked at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider, CERN. He has been awarded the Antarctica Service Medal, a Sloan Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation Career Award.

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Ian Bell Ian Bell is a mathematician and computer scientist who joined forces with David Braben when the two of them were studying at Jesus College, Cambridge University, to co-create Elite, one of the most influential computer games of all time, The main points of focus for his work on Elite were rotation and 3D movement.

Tristan Myles An Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor at Double Negative (DNEG), Tristan Myles has worked on over thirty big-budget films, including The Dark Knight Rises, First Man, Interstellar, and Blade Runner 2049. The most recent film he has supervised on, the highly-anticipated Dune, is due to be released in October 2021.

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Space is big. And, though they may have been getting inexorably bigger, TV screens are pretty small. The challenge of conveying the arguably incomprehensible vastness of space on something even as large as an IMAX screen is therefore a real one. It’s a philosophical as well as a technical dilemma. Can any type of fiction ever truly do justice to the magnitude of space? It may be impossible even for astrophysicists themselves. As Carl Sagan said, ‘The size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding’ (Sagan, 1980). Because the player can explore a world over months if not, in fact, forever, computer games may have an advantage over films or TV shows as being the optimal medium for appreciating the complexity of astrophysics. Ian Bell co-designed the 1984 computer game Elite, which went on to influence many open-world games. The original Elite universe contained eight galaxies, each of which had 256 planets. Although the game is revered for its seminal impact on the genre, Bell says that he and co-creator David Braben never intended to simulate the real cosmos. ‘It’s a complete fiction, essentially,’ Bell says of the classic Elite universe. The world of the game was based on the Star Wars universe, as well as aspects of 2001: A Space Odyssey and other science fiction sources. The distance between the sun and the planet was ‘bogus’, in Bell’s words. He once worked out that when travelling within the solar system the game’s spaceship was actually travelling at 25 mph. The exception was that the player could use hyperspace to travel to another star system within seven light-years ‘instantaneously’. Elite spawned five increasingly realistic sequels, none of which

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THE

TASTE OF

STARS Roberto Trotta Professor of Astrophysics and Astrostatistics at Imperial College London. Dr Trotta is a cosmologist with a passion for enabling public engagement with his field and is author of The Edge of the Sky, which explains the universe using only the 100 most common words in the English language. He also runs G-Astronomy, a project which uses food as an edible metaphor for theories of the universe.

Quentin Vicas Director of International Development, Ducasse Paris. Ducasse works closely with the ESA to provide food for astronauts on board the ISS. The company aims to take versions of their Michelin Star quality food and make them safe for consumption in space, as a way to connect astronauts to home.

Nicole Stott A NASA astronaut and artist with two spaceflights and 104 days living and working in space as a crewmember on the ISS and the Space Shuttle. Her multi-disciplinary approach made her an ideal candidate for us to gain insights on culinary experiences in space.

Kate Tighe: So, Professor Trotta, what do you think the stars would taste like?

for people who are, perhaps, a little bit intimidated by the subject.

Roberto Trotta: Well, all stars are unique, so I would expect them to taste, metaphorically speaking of course, different, depending on the kind of star that they are. For example, some stars are hot and fiery, so I would expect them to be sprinkled with chilli. Other stars, like our sun, might be a bit more subtle – a bit more like peaches – a mellow star which is just sweet enough to support life on our planet.

Quentin Vicas: For us, I would say it gets more important as [space] flights start to get longer. Dinner time is really an important moment, obviously, for us French, but also other nationalities. It is the only time of the day that people on board the ISS, and indeed other space flights, gather together, and so the experience of sharing a meal together is important both psychologically and physically.

KT: Would you say that the culinary arts are an important tool for exploring and learning about space?

Nicole Stott: Yes, I agree. When we go to space now we tend to want to make the way astronauts are eating as similar to the ways in which we eat and share food on Earth. It’s going to be very different when we talk about going on a 35 million mile trip to Mars. How do we incorporate those psychological elements? Do we perhaps use sounds and smells that satisfy, or maybe even some kind of Virtual Reality (minus the headsets!), perhaps paired with a little pill that expands into something bigger that gives us the nutrition that’s required but also helps with the psychological connection to home through food?

RT: I certainly see the culinary arts as a great way to explore cosmology, furthering our understanding of space, astronomy, astrophysics, and difficult far-away ideas such as black holes and dark matter. Gastronomy has got a great role to play because the culinary arts are very inclusive. Because this is a participatory experience we are all familiar with, it can be used to lower barriers in terms of science communication, to make space and cosmology more inclusive

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3D-printed cup holders designed for people with visual impairment, with ridges based on data from the European Space Agency’s satellite Planck on the distribution of light 380,000 years after the Big Bang, 2017. © Roberto Trotta.

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ICE

FOR THE

FIRST TIME Alan Lightman Dr Alan Lightman is a physicist, poet, and science writer, as well as a well-known advocate of the synthesis of science and art. He is currently Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz Dr Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz is a Professor and Chair of Astrophysics and Astronomy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests focus on energetic accretion processes in black holes and neutron stars

Pippa Goldschmidt Pippa Goldschmidt started out as a professional astrophysicist but is now a writer of non-fiction, poetry, and long and short fiction. She is currently a writer in residence at The Science, Technology and Innovation Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh.

Sunayana Bhargava Sunayana Bhargava is a postdoctoral researcher at CEA Paris-Saclay. Her interests focus on the X-ray emission from galaxy clusters and its relation to cosmological parameters. She is also an editor of Consilience, a science poetry journal.

TECHNICAL ARTICLE

WRITTEN BY PIPPA COLE, CHRIS FLUKE, ABI FROST, ALASTAIR GUNN, & TOM HAWORTH

INTRODUCTION 0.1 Opening statement 0.2 Definitions 0.3 Paper Outline 0.4 This Paper’s Thesis

TACTILISATION 1.1 Introduction 1.2 A Multimedia Universe 1.3 The Cosmic Web 1.4 3D Printing 1.5 Conclusion

SONIFICATION 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The Technical Side 2.3 Case studies 2.4 Accessibility 2.5 For Artistic Reasons 2.6 Conclusion

3 4 6

5 CONCLUSION

VISUALISATION 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Visualisation in Astrophysics 3.3 The Use and Misuse of Colour 3.4 Cinematic Visualisation 3.5 The Future 3.6 Conclusion

COMMUNICATION 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Journal Articles 4.3 Conferences 4.4 Conclusion

DIVERGENT THINKING 5.1 Introduction 5.2 In Science 5.3 Conclusion

61 Opening 6.2 Summary 6.3 Concluding remarks | 291

0 INTRODUCTION

0.1 OPENING STATEMENT It takes real imagination to comprehend the Universe, all thirteen billion light years of it. Whilst mathematics and statistics are, predominantly, the tools used to understand its mysteries, non-numerical insights are key in order to identify the right questions to ask in the first place. No astrophysicist has ever travelled back in time to the Big Bang, flown through the atmosphere of an exoplanet, or witnessed a galaxy form, and yet they are required to envision, develop, and methodise systems for understanding these processes. Symbols of the cosmos can be found in works encompassing all forms of creative practice. From Van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889), to golden stars swinging from necklaces, or the epic galaxy vistas of Hollywood blockbusters, there is widespread appreciation for the beauty of the night skies. However, the impact creative disciplines can have on astrophysics is more subtle, less appreciated and easily missed, even by practitioners.

0.2 DEFINITIONS Astrophysics can be defined as the application of the laws of physics to astronomical objects, including planets, stars, and galaxies. Astrophysics is closely related to the fields of astronomy, which is generally understood to be an observational discipline, and cosmology, which is the study of the laws of the universe as a whole.

0.3 PAPER OUTLINE There are three main sensory practices which are currently employed by astrophysicists: tactilisation, sonification, and visualisation. They have been harnessed both for their ability to communicate interpretations of scientific data amongst scientists and to the general public, as well as for encouraging creative and divergent thought processes in scientific research. In this article, we explore to what extent they have been successful on these two counts. We ask whether there is potential to make better use

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of their unique perspective on the field of astrophysics, and where technological advances will play a role in the future of sensory-driven data handling and presentation. Creative disciplines can play a substantial role in communication between scientists, as well as to the broader public. From drawing doodles on blackboards, to plots in journal publications, to listening to chirps in amongst a noisy signal. Non-textual renderings of both theory and data are used for understanding and explaining scientific concepts at all levels from the classroom, the office or laboratory, to the conference hall. The same is true of public engagement and outreach. Visual, tactile, and auditory presentations of complex concepts have proved successful at explaining even the most abstract of thoughts to those who might think that astrophysics is out of their reach. There are tangible examples, such as the use of graphics and sound for data visualisation, where indigestible tables of numbers are replaced succinctly by images or audio. Creative works can provide an overall impression and conclusion, where inspecting each constituent datapoint individually would be unilluminating, and impossible on a large scale.

0.4 THIS PAPER’S THESIS Creative disciplines might also influence the ways in which scientists formulate ideas, in a less tangible way. Whilst science is often thought of as a rigid, rule-based endeavour, progress springs from creativity and abstract thinking. There are far more similarities than might be expected between the working processes of creatives and scientists. Picture the archetypal artist, in dungarees, with paint in their hair, and prototypes strewn across their cluttered loft. Now, picture an astrophysicist (admittedly a theorist), with rolled up shirt sleeves, chalk in their hair, and surrounded by crumpled, discarded pieces of paper. Both images conjure up the notion of free-thinking creatives. Could more space be made for scientists to harness the freedom of thought and expression that artists hold as a prerequisite for producing high-quality work? It is, in fact, a great shame that the arts and sciences are so often defined in very distinct and separate realms, even at the earliest stages of the education system. There are such complementarities to both the process and the output of creative and scientific disciplines, that it could be enriching and valuable to allow greater flux between them. Whilst many of the articles in this edition explore the ways in which astrophysics has been interpreted through creative disciplines, in this piece we aim to celebrate the converse. Namely, to highlight the valuable impact of creative disciplines on astrophysics, and to encourage room for creative influences in astrophysics research and the communication thereof.

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Detail of Small spatial model of space viruses and their mutations, 2019/2020. Machine embroidery on fabric, objects. Photo credit: David Ertl

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Alexandra Knie graduated in Fine Arts and, also, Social Science (20032007), and studied Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Genova (Italy) and Textil Design, Arts and Humanities. Her special interest lies in intersections between art, craft, and science, working in painting, drawing, screen printing, textile techniques, and most of all, machine embroidery. She has lectured, written, collaborated, and exhibited widely – most recently at the University of Paderborn and the 2021 MatterAntimatter exhibition, Castellón, Spain.

CREATIVE STATEMENT My artistic investigations concentrate on scientific illustrations, terms, and methods as they are applied in microbiology, astronomy, or astrobiology. Through application of microscopic and macroscopic images into a hand or machine embroidery, I aim to link two typically divergent areas: modern science and historical textile techniques. Small spatial model of space viruses and their mutations, 2019/2020 This installation creates a walk-through model of a speculative universe and simulated laboratory situation, and is based in an astrobiological assumption that viruses could also exist in space. I have designed serial scenarios of extraterrestrial viruses and their mutations, exhibited as machine-embroidered models. These space viruses combine electron microscope images of viruses present on Earth, such as the polio virus or the coronavirus, with creative alterations. The plexiglass tubes are reminiscent of petri dishes and test tubes

Alexandra Knie

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Krista Steinke is an interdisciplinary artist working in experimental photography, video/film, and installation. Her creative practice revolves around the humanenvironmental relationship and how photography (both moving and still) helps us to better understand ourselves through the lens of the natural world. Her time based work has been exhibited and screened at museums, galleries, and film festivals internationally, including Currents New Media Festival, NM; Jersey City Art Museum, NJ; Earth Day Film Festival, CA; Symphony Space, NY; Sarai Media Lab, New Delhi; Goliath Visual Space, NY; the Green Screen Environmental Film Festival, Trinidad + Tobago; and the Asia Culture Center, Republic of Korea, among others. Awards include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, a grant from the Puffin Foundation, a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and a Fellowship from the Howard Foundation. She has been a visiting artist at numerous colleges and graduate schools and has participated in several photo festivals and conferences either as an exhibiting artist, speaker, or curator. She holds a BA from Valparaiso University, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a MFA in Photography and Digital imaging from The Maryland Institute, College of Art.

Krista Steinke

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Antoine Bertin

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Antoine Bertin works at the intersection of science and sensory immersion, field recording and sound storytelling, data and music composition. His creations take the form of listening experiences, sound sculptures and audio meditations. His work has been presented at Tate Britain, Palais de Tokyo, Serpentine Gallery, CCCB Barcelona, Centre Pompidou, KIKK, STRP, and more. He produces a show called, The edge of the forest, on the web radio NTS, and in 2018, he founded Sound Anything, a creative studio based in Paris, which designs listening experiences.

CREATIVE STATEMENT Hearing Gravity is an immersive installation inviting participants to experience the physics of black holes through the sense of hearing. Developed in collaboration with relativity theorist André Füzfa (e.g. Füzfa, 2019), the experience takes advantage of binaural technology to hack into the listener’s own sense of time. A fifteen-minute journey, experienced by one participant at a time, this work sits at the intersection of immersive theatre, science documentary, and spatial soundwalk. From steps in the sand to gravitational waves, sounds guide visitors through light, obscurity, and sensoriality, as they hear themselves in different times. ‘It’s fascinating and scary: what would happen you were to fall into a black hole? With the artistic and scientific installation of Antoine Bertin, it is now possible to experience it.’ – Margaux Dussert (l’ADN Magazine) ‘So provocative, moving, and alarming. A spectacular piece of work with real mastery of human perception.’ – Sam Bompas (Bompas & Parr Studio)

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