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KACZMARSKI: Welcome everybody to the Krannert Art Museum on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus.
We are actually now in the Intermedia Gallery.
My name is Hank Kaczmarski and I am the Director of the Illinois Simulator Laboratory at the
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
A lot of what we do as scientists has artistic value too.
And so we built this laboratory, this gallery, whatever you want to call it, a number of years ago
and we are going to talk about a show that we have right now called ‘Astronomic!’
In a previous show we highlighted Nature at the most microscopic level.
We asked the question of whether MRIs, CAT Scans, electron microscope images of blood cells can truly be works of art.
Can Nature be the first and foremost artist?
In this show we try and highlight Nature at the largest scale to ask the question:
Is Nature at the most large-scale, is there artistic value in those images in what Nature has created?
The idea was to get as many different types of media --
paintings, sculpture, books from the fourteen-hundreds that are barely holding together,
media in dimensions even higher than the three dimensions that sculptors work in.
And that was the point of this gallery. And I think, as you walk through,
consider Astronomic! the show to be a metaphor for the kind of art
that artists in the twenty-first-century should be able to do.
The first piece in the exhibit is a replica of maybe the first piece ever made discussing
the Earth as the center of the universe. And the Sun is out here on the fourth circle.
And then all of the signs of the zodiac, in Arabic, are on this sphere.
It is a solid brass sphere. A replica of an actual object that is in the near east.
Thirteen-fifty, somewhere between thirteen-fifty and fourteen hundred.
And even this far away in time people in the Muslim countries knew that
the earth was round, even though the people in Portugal and England weren't so sure about it.
The signs of the zodiac -- so astronomy and astrology were sort of one in the same thing back then.
We’re looking at one of the very earliest printed books that are still left in the world.
This is the Liber Chronicarum, or the Nuremberg Chronicles actually in English.
And it basically shows the history of Germany from the creation all the way to 1493.
And so, of course, when you are starting with creation you have to start off with Genesis.
And the page that it is open to again shows the earth as the center of the universe;
as a Gia-centric galaxy universe with the Sun as the fourth orbiting device around there.
So we go from a book that was published in the fourteen-hundreds
to a map that was published in fifteen-sixty-eight.
It is the Earth and then the planets: the Moon of course, Mercury, Venus, and then the Sun.
I mean that is fairly obvious if you are standing on a stationary Earth.
And so now you have got to accept that the Earth is round.
But you do not necessarily have to accept that the Earth is somewhere out here;
kind of a secondary sort of planet sort of thing like everybody else that is out there.
And, if you did try and explain this, you pretty much were burned at the stake.
This is a very artistic, but very inaccurate representation of the way things are.
Those objects are sort of orthogonal to this very twenty-first century screen.
Each of these little squares, and there are 192 squares, has three LEDs.
LEDs were invented on the University of Illinois campus.
And this display wall, which used to be a digital dance floor,
is driven by the SETI at Home program; the program that captures satellite
and Earthstation information and tries to find extraterrestrial life.
So, sort of the joke here is that the search for extraterrestrial life
is illuminating these other 1400s and 1500s objects.
I don't think, if a person stood here for the entire duration
of the gallery show, they would see a martian waving at us or something.
This thing is going to be as effective at finding extraterrestrial life
as the real computers that are hidden behind there are…
and that is not very.
John Lamberg is a really fun artist.
He has done work with Carl Sagan for almost all Carl's major works.
And it was one of Carl Sagan’s favorite pieces.
So this is the connecting piece between the last show that we did,
about imaging Nature at the smallest level, and the astronomy level.
So here John has put the double helix DNA strand floating out in the galaxy;
showing the connection between Nature at the smallest and Nature at the larger scale.
So it was this piece that was really instrumental in setting the theme for the entire show.
John is a living artist in Hawaii. This is an original piece that John has signed just for this show.
We are really excited to have it here.
The image behind me is a picture taken from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.
It is a satellite that is just hanging out in the space of no gravitational pull between the Earth and the Sun.
And it is aimed directly at the Sun and is just taking pictures of solar flares at various wavelengths
So we gave this image to a stained glass artist, an artist who works with hot glass, Suzette Hogan.
We said, ‘If this were your inspiration for a piece, what would the piece be?’
And she spent several months during the hot summer blowing glass
to create the piece that is here. It is called Heliostasis.
And, just like the Sun is emitting gas and essentially diminishing itself over time,
the piece she has created is the Sun starting at the very inception, before all the hydrogen really got bubbling around…
moving up to a really nice full, bright Sun…
to a Sun that was so bright that it started spitting stuff out just like the image…
to a Sun that was beginning to sort of decay a little bit…
maybe decay a lot…
maybe turn into a black hole at the end.
It is really about the life of the Sun and the life of everything that revolves around the Sun.
Neitzsche said, ‘If you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.’
That was the inspirational phrase for the artist that did this piece.
These are images taken by the Hubble superimposed with other images that the artist thought would best work with that phrase.
So I will leave it to the museum visitor to actually figure out what is going on here.
But this is a very fascinating piece and it has attracted quite a bit of attention.
We have Chesley Bonestell who, in 1942, was kind of an itinerant artist.
And he decided to create paintings of the solar system.
So he has got astronauts, teeny little astronauts, landing on Mimas, one of the moons of Saturn,
looking at a Saturn-rise.
He managed to sell this image to Life magazine for a May 29th, 1944 issue. This is the actual, real issue.
It is amazing what you can buy on eBay.
They didn't want this to be considered a photograph so they said that the astronauts are just put in there for scale…
that they are not really there.
In 1981, Voyager II flew close enough to Saturn to take a picture of Saturn that looks remarkably,
remarkably like what Chesley Bonestell was imagining sixty years, fifty years earlier.
So, imaginary image… real image.
What we are looking at in the background is the CANVAS… the Collaborative Advanced Navigation Virtual Art Studio.
And it is a 3-D space developed as a CAVE virtual environment by the University of Illinois at Chicago,
that was used for visualizing large data sets.
But now we are using it to visualize everything from four-dimensional perceptual psychology
experiment training to, what we have here, the universe.
These are images put together by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, programmers,
and artists throughout campus, to create images that are fairly representative of what we think is going on in the universe.
We did not doctor the images. We just let people who have an interest in astronomy
put 3-D data sets, 3-D imagery, into this CANVAS, this CAVE environment, to have people just sit and
look at the universe and maybe appreciate the artistry of Nature.
Or maybe just say, ‘yea, there are a bunch of dots flying around the screen.’
So the physical structure here is a commercial product called a ViewStation.
It is designed to present an image that, when you sit up close enough, it provides enough information in your
peripheral view to where you don't need stereo glasses to be able to get a sense of depth, a sense of immersion in the space.
Maybe even a level beyond a plasma screen or a LCD screen, you can actually get up-close
and look at this spiral galaxy, which is one of the objects on the wall, see the spiral galaxies spin around,
and totally cover your peripheral view.
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When we walk around the gallery, it is difficult to say what image or what sculpture is artistic and what is scientific.
What I tried to select were images that were done by artists, images that were done by machines,
images that were done by engineers who maybe thought they had an artistic bent to them.
As a member of the Beckman Institute, we have an awful lot of researchers that are visualizing
Nature at the smallest level and nature are the largest level. So we had a tremendous pool of talent
to draw from within our own university.
The show started August 23rd and it will go through at least the end of December;
or possibly the second week in January depending on whether we keep everything up and running.
We hope to be able to take this on the road like we have taken other exhibits on the road.
And, if we find another museum that is interested in taking this show to their studio, we are more than willing
to have it go on the road and highlight the work that University of Illinois researchers do.
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