Existing comment:
Singularities & Infinities
Shanthi Chandrasekar & Michael Albrow
Artists' Statement
Michael Albrow met Shanthi Chandrasekar when she exhibited her multimedia artwork at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, IL, and gave a colloquium on how science inspires her work. At dinner that evening, Albrow encouraged Chandrasekar to publish a book of her images and offered to write short pieces on the science inspiring her work - the Big Bang, black holes, particle physics and so on. This conversation resulted in the show, Singularities & Infinities.
While artists and scientists view the universe through different disciplinary lenses, there is much in common a sense of wonder and beauty, a fascination with the unknown, the boundaries of our knowledge, the perfect symmetries and broken symmetries. Art and science are parallel cultures, both dealing in observations and both important to our civilization. The key distinction is that science deals with measurements, needs mathematics, and seeks the truth about the world. If a beautiful idea is shown to be wrong, it must be discarded; the truth is likely to be even more beautiful. The arts deal with instinct, expression, and emotions; art should convey and evoke feelings and be thought-provoking. Unlike science, art cannot be wrong, but can be
uninteresting.
As a scientist, Albrow found Chandrasekar's art to be not only beautiful but extremely interesting; the more closely one looks, the more one sees. That is literally true also in physics. Through his writings, Albrow tries to make abstract scientific concepts more accessible to everyone. Chandrasekar's drawings and Albrow's prose and poetry are intertwined to explore and express concepts of the cosmos, from the very smallest particles to the whole universe. |