eye opener
Geist London, UK Part of Canary Wharf’s Winter Lights, which took place this January, Geist is an artwork created by Harriet Lumby and Alan Hayes, aka This is Loop. Working with world-leading particle physicists, This is Loop was inspired by the elusive neutrino or ‘ghost particle’, with Geist exploring the hunt that is played out in enormous neutrino detectors to prove the existence of these particles. Debuting at Winter Lights, Geist is designed as a touring artwork for exhibition in the public realm. Shaped like an octagonal carousel, six-metres in diameter, each of its faces is a 3x3-metre window into a figment of reflection and light, created by a mirror illusion and showing a suspended illuminated orb. The illusion is interactive; only by the proximity and movement of the audience does the suspended particle of light come to life. Individually addressable LED modules start flickering and glimmering in the presence of people. The public are the cause of the artwork’s existence, with their interactions eliciting a response from the artwork; a version of the ‘hide and seek’ played out in a neutrino detector, where only an interaction with an atom reveals the neutrino. The scientific narrative of Geist has involved input from particle physicists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and the Physics Department at Oxford University. The collected group of physicists have provided access to and context for real neutrino oscillation measurements from the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan. In collaboration with newmedia artist Motus Art, and sound artist Dan Bibby, This is Loop has re-interpreted actual neutrino interactions seen by T2K, using input from motion sensor cameras and complex code, into the animation of moving light and audio for Geist. The type of ‘neutrino’ seen will depend on the neutrino oscillation probabilities from T2K. When the audience interacts with the sculpture, Geist will reflect a visual and audio representation of the detection of a neutrino. “We are super excited about unveiling Geist,” says Alan Hayes of This is Loop. “The artwork has been a collaborative effort to take deep scientific theory and data and interpret it into a public artwork. “Neutrinos are one of the most significant areas of current scientific research, and have the potential to answer fundamental questions about the existence of the universe. “We’re honoured to have the support of the STFC and the physicists at Oxford University, and to get the opportunity to work with real data from the Kamiokande Neutrino detector in Japan is a dream come true.” www.thisisloop.co.uk
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