Despite its relatively small size, Cosmic Titans is an exhibition as intense as its name indicates. Named after the massive galaxies such as the recently discovered Hyperion, it shows the work of nine artists invited for a residency at the ARTlab founded by Professor Silke Weinfurtner and Dr. Ulrike Kuchner in 2022 at the University of Nottingham. While Weinfurtner is based in the School of Mathematical Sciences and a pioneer in the field of black hole simulations, Kuchner is a Senior Researcher in Astronomy and Art-Science collaborations in the School of Physics and Astronomy. Their exhibition, co-curated with Neil Walker, Head of Visual Arts Programming at Lakeside Arts and Prof. Helen Kennedy of the Virtual & Immersive Production Studio, joyously celebrates the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. While the University finds itself at the forefront of research into quantum physics, with its ARTlab and this exhibition it can also be said to be at the forefront of exemplary art-science collaborations.

Cosmic Titans is an excellent example of a transdisciplinary art-science collaboration. [1] Working alongside researchers in quantum physics, the invited artists were commissioned to contribute six new works for the exhibition. Apart from the fact that these “give expression to the excitement, wonder and poetry of cutting-edge scientific discovery that is transforming our future” [2] appealing to a large audience, the artistic visualization also provides new insights for the scientists. As Weinfurtner and Kuchner explain in a video for The New Scientist, the artistic skills make it possible to visualize or to make experiential abstract concepts that even for scientists are largely incomprehensible. To which the quantum world adds a specific kind of weirdness that artists are capable of transforming into an experience that can be seen, heard and felt, thus “making the intangible tangible.” [3]

Although art-science collaborations in themselves are nothing new, [4] one of the biggest challenges in any kind of art-science collaboration, whether inter- or transdisciplinary, in artlabs, art-based research or other, is finding a shared language. One way of finding this language is to give the collaboration sufficient time. This is something in which the project, thanks to the long-term residencies of artists in the laboratory, succeeded rather well. While engaged in ongoing experiments, artists and scientist kept “ping ponging back and forth”. Adding to the successful outcome might be the observation of Kuchner in The New Scientist-video that the combination of art and physics is a particularly good match due to their similar point of departure – setting something up, testing it, adapting it until it works.

The multi-sensory experience of Cosmic Titans starts with the impressive installation Ringdown by Royal Academician Conrad Shawcross. Shawcross, as the first resident during the summer of 2023, visited the early universe laboratory of Weinfurtner. Upon seeing their experiments, he proposed a controlled experiment-audiovisual artwork to visualize the moment just before two blackholes collide and merge into one and for which ‘ringdown’ is actually the scientific term. Set in motion by pushing a button and, thus, giving the audience agency, two huge bronze bells, set in a hanging geodesic hemisphere, slowly start to move, accelerate and finally collide. Their action is accompanied with “a rising, chaotic and decelerating sound” as an expression of the enormous energy that is involved in the merging of black holes. The readings of sensors that measure the magnetic field of the artwork are displayed on a monitor in a laboratory-like setting which data actually inform the scientific research. The laboratory returns in a second installation by Shawcross in collaboration with the Gravity Lab, The Blind Proliferation, in which he depicts the idea of the multiverse in a particular interesting way. Set on both sides of a moving sculpture that casts patterns of light and shadow on its surrounding walls are (almost) completely identical observation stations. Kuchner makes the comparison with Plato’s cave where the source of shadows is interpreted without have direct access to this source. Shawcross installation suggests that this detecting work is possibly unawares done in parallel worlds.

Giving full justice to the richness of this exhibition project, it’s exciting process, outcomes and the questions it raises, is hardly possible within the confines of this review. Suffice it to say that Alistair McClymont’s An Early Universe equally contributes with a strong multi-sensual experience to other ways of researching the moment just after the Big Bang, ‘simply’ using white light on rippling and resounding water. For their installation Begriff des Körpers (Comprehending the Body in Space) duo Daniela Brill Estrada & Monica C. LoCascio refer in a multi-faceted way to the lecture that the Third Founder of Quantum Theory, Albert Einstein gave at the University of Nottingham on the 6th of June 1930. [5] Acknowledging the subjective role of the body in understanding the cosmos that Einstein referred to in connection with the so-called Unruh Effect-experiment of the Gravity Laboratory that expresses this, the result is an amalgam of elements such as a hand-crocheted structure referring to spacetime curvature around black holes, and the poetic imagery scientists surprisingly tend to use, carved in copper strips.

Matthew Woodham’s Superdecision and Studio Above&Below’s Quantum Lens complete the exhibition. Whereas the first is a somewhat sturdy instrument exploring “quantum mechanics as a metaphor for personal decision-making” and its uncertainty, the latter makes use of the latest Apple Vision Pro-headset to make the quantum world experiential. Although highly popular with visitors, this apparently very exciting VR-experience was unfortunately lost on me as the headset wouldn’t agree with my glasses and bad eyesight.

Altogether Cosmic Titans certainly merits the fact that it will travel on, first to the Science Museum in London and later hopefully also to other (international) venues.

References

[1] See for an interesting discussion of the difference between trans- and interdisciplinary art-science collaborations Claudia Schnugg (2022). ArtScience Collaboration: Serendipity and Beyond Innovation.

[2] See https://www.lakesidearts.org.uk/exhibition/cosmictitans/. For more information it’s also useful to visit https://www.lakesidearts.org.uk/about/press/

[3] See https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535340-200-exhibition-uses-art-to-explore-the-mysteries-of-the-quantum-world/.

[4] See amongst others Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder, 2008 which remains an excellent overview of early artscience.

[5] The blackboard signed by Einstein is still preserved in the university. See https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/alumni/hidden-gems.