VARIA
Book I: Zofia Szczฤ sna This project was made for the Library of the Faculty of Astronomy, Physics, and Applied Computer Science at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, with partnership from the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Varia series contains total of five books, rest of which can be found in different places of the Library, specified on the bookmarks left at the counter and on the tables with short description of the project.
Krakรณw 2018
Table of contents
Preface........................................................10 About book Noise.......................................14 About book Neutron Matter.......................18 About shared pictures.................................24 Zofia Szczęsna - Bio....................................74
Preface
The idea to create a series of artbooks came to us when I was brainstorming with Kathryn Zazenski in the main library of the Faculty of Physics one snowy morning. We asked ourselves how we could introduce an art project into that specific space, something tailored to the space, to not disturb its purpose but to add something new. We decided to create books for specific sections of the library. Artworks in the form of books would blend into the library shelves and would be almost indiscernible from the others, however when found they would serve a different purpose than the more traditional collection (if we can speak of any kind of purpose in artistic creation - but that’s a vast topic, for a long and deep debate which I won’t attempt here but rather leave as an open question for you, the reader). We walked through all parts of the library, even visiting the restricted section with old, rare and valuable volumes. One section in particular drew our attention - it was called Varia. We decided to place the two main books describing our project in there and name the project after this specific section. Becasue after all, this is what we both do. Art is usually something thought of as “weird” and outside of the more normalized vocations. Artworks themselves are difficult to place or arrange in specific classes or sets. To add to it, our area of focus is weird even for art standards, since we both work with physicists and draw our inspirations from pure, strict, scientific research, and the way it’s carried out.
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We both take very different approach to the same area of art and science connections though. It determined our choice for book covers. Both books made by Kathryn are white while mine are black. Zazenski is more interested in human experience and how science can be used as an intuitive language for art. Her work also touches on the subject of the everyday experience. As she is more focused on the internal or emotional aspect of a human being and the human experience, we decided that her works would represent the “sacrum” half of this project. My works fall under the “profanum,” since my area of focus is outside of human experience. What interests me most is matter itself. My works are impressions of how the world appears from a purely physical standpoint, where human feelings or experiences are irrelevant. The project Varia is an example of the interdisciplinary nature of science and art. Since it touches both art and some aspects of science and does so from two very different angles, it is something that classifies it for varia library section. The field of science is very important for all the works created for this project. We both dive deep into our subjects, beyond the popular science level, yet what we do still cannot be called science. At the same time, however, it goes beyond simply inspiration. What we do could easily find a home in the varia sections of science, art, and literature collections.
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The two primary Varia books are placed in the varia section of the library. The others are carefully placed among the books in other sections that are dedicated to the topics that were our inspirations for each book. They can be found using the bookmarks we designed for the project and that have been left in various places throughout the library. We also created a website that is an online archive of the project. Z. Szczęsna, 2018
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About book Noise
Noise is rather a single artwork that allows for and encourages interference within the recipient rather than existing as a book with artworks inside. The form of the book was ideal for this kind of work because the pages themselves build the different images, appearing and disappearing with each page turn. The predetermined ordering of the pages is the typical book format which allowed me to design the kind of images that would appear through the noise while browsing the pages of this artbook. For me, the main Varia book works also to describe the other two artbooks (both Noise and Neutron Matter) that are works themselves. Noise in scientific research has always been an important topic for my work, sometimes using it as a way to express ideas visually while other times it was the conceptual crux of bodies of work. It requires a high level of expertise and a certain level of artistry for a researcher to be able to read the nuances of noise and disturbances in this data, therefore it drew my attention as an artist. I love creating detailed work, small, sophisticated changes make a big difference for me. After speaking with researches in radio astronomy I learned that it’s a very similar experience for them as well. Sometimes it takes months to be sure that an actual aberration was detected as opposed to something human-generated, like a cellphone or heavier car driving through the area (as is the case with the gravitational waves detection) or other natural obstacles 12
like weather, clouds of gas, debris, or other stellar objects obstructing the observation. In time, with proper training and knowledge (and also a measure of luck sometimes), scientists are able to read the physical properties of stars from graphs that to everyone else look like old, blurry, our of tune TV screens. Many pepole think of astronomers and astrophysicists in a very old fashioned way. The times when an astronomer looks through an eyepiece of a telescope with their own eyes are long gone. Observations are being made through the use of very different types of instruments, from radio telescopes in the form of huge antenas to various types of cameras that detect different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, including those we can’t manage to see with our human eyes, like X rays or infrared light. Yet still, even though these machines are much more capable of seeing every kind of light that is invisible to our eyes, they do have flaws. Sometimes they are so sophisticated and so sensitive that everyday human activity, or simply the physical environment they are in, makes it hard for researchers to distinguish a background noise from an actual measurement of something significant. Seeing something in that noise requires skill, focus, and time. The artbook Noise works in a similar way. It requires the viewer of the work to spend time looking carefully, to focus on the changing visual effects to 13
see how the blurred image slowly changes, vibrates, soughs. Sometimes something figurative appears out of an abstract image, just to disappear again with the next page turn. This artwork is an impression of noise from astrophysical research, not specifically radio astronomy nor any other branch in this scientific field. It merely illustrates the problems of detecting light that is so far away, sometimes coming from different galaxies, and the complications that exist when trying to draw accurate conclusions from them here on Earth. The main image can’t be fully focused since it doesn’t appear as a whole on any of the semi-transparent pages of the book. It is a digitally processed, magnified fragment of a large format print (dry-point, gravure traditional printing). The work also touches on the theme of noise in astrophysics, and now I used the opportunity to give it a wider context and deepen it’s perception.
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About book Neutron Matter
The Neutron Matter art book is full of drawings and sketches made over the course of the last 5 years. They are more or less strict interpretations of neutron stars (including pulsars) and neutron matter. Originally the works were part of a sketchbook where I used charcoal, oil paint, and pencil, the subsequent effects in this book are a result of digital processing. Ultimately, the created works aesthetically resemble X rays mixed with radio astronomy graphs. Both are visualizations of light we cannot see, which is the case for neutron stars radiating both high energy light and radio waves, invisible to the human eye. Images are placed in two versions, side-by-side. The version on the left page is always a blurred, imperfect version of the sharp, final version on the right page. This is also a reference to the process of discovering full images from huge stores of data collected by the instruments used in astrophysical research. It was visually interesting for me to see how the final picture would look when taken to the extreme, after several levels of digital processing, which is the opposite of what happens while creating astrophysical data (when sharp images are obtained from blurred ones). I started with my handmade drawings from the sketchbook and then I processed them to obtain the digital pictures. I then processed them aga16
in, which resulted in completely unreadable images comparing them to the originals. I also found that there is not a reverse similarity in the process that has connections in it’s execution to obtaining final data from various kinds of astrophysical research. When the observations are carried out, the light that the instruments detect is from a star that is being examined. Then through digital programs data is obtained, and what is relevant must be drawn out from a bigger picture, separated from the noise, the instrument’s flaws, and any other kind of interference that may occur during the observation process. In the case of my artworks for the book Neutron Matter, original drawings from the sketchbook are being sent to the computer through an instrument - in this case a scanner. Large amounts of data (pictures placed on the right pages) is obtained through digital processing, and then small, blurred pieces of it are pushed to the extremes of what the program is capable of, in order to create an image that has only a vague resemblance to the drawing that it originated from. In my opinion this represents what we get from these types of observations - on one hand it’s really a lot, given the fact of how far we have come in researching such exotic objects as neutron stars, and how many we can see and deduce from what these instruments show us. On the other hand it still is just a small, incomplete, detached bit from the whole of the original source that we’re examining, with all its properties and nuances happening 17
inside and around a given stellar object. Which, in the case of neutron stars is something that we can’t recreate nor observe anywhere on Earth nor in our Solar system. These pictures show my impressions of the density of neutron matter, the high rotation of pulsars, the way they emit light, and the extreme conditions they create in their surroundings. Also important to me are the properties of the matter they are composed of; we observe extreme and unusual properties in neutrons, bearing incredibly dense matter. They balance on the edge of matter, often times collapsing under their own weight. No terrestrial laboratory can produce matter with a density close to the matter inside neutron stars. They are remnants of the cores of the most massive stars that ended their lives during a supernova explosion. Pulsars are neutron stars that are leftover after such extreme events. They spin very fast (sometimes even hundreds of times per second) and emit radio waves from their magnetic poles. The mechanism is similar to how a lighthouse works - we see its light as pulsations because the light source is actually spinning. Pulsars are very small (around 20 km in diameter) and very massive (weighing more than our Sun)1. The only objects that we know of with greater density are black holes. Neutron stars have an outer crust made of pure iron, and interiors (according to theories and conclusions drawn from research carried out thus far) of degenerate neutron matter that is so dense that it makes it impossible for atoms to exist. Only superfluid neutrons are present, which makes such objects as compact as an atomic nucleus. Theoretical predictions claim that within the core there is so called ‘quark matter,’ even denser than the neutron matter.2 18
This is what causes the neutron stars to have such a powerful effect on their surroundings - speeding nearby gas to relativistic speeds, creating the most powerful magnetic fields, making it possible to measure gravitational waves if there are two neutron stars orbiting each other, etc. This is my inspiration for Neutron Matter.
1 - D. R. Lorimer, M. Kramer, “Handbook of Pulsar Astronomy”, Cambridge University Press, New York 2005, ISBN: 978-0-521-53534-2, p.1 2 - D. R. Lorimer, M. Kramer, “Handbook of Pulsar Astronomy”, Cambridge University Press, New York 2005, ISBN: 978-0-521-53534-2, p.59 19
About shared pictures
Part of the Varia project was exchanging 25 pictures with Kathryn. She sent me 25 images of her choosing, and I sent her the same amount. We never specified what the pictures should present and how we will use them after the exchange. It was an experiment for us to see how a purely visual dialog between us would go. It was important because we developed Varia together, yet from different points of view in context of approaching this relationship between science and art. It was important for us to see how we would respond to each others images as artists, as visual creators. My approach was to add something directly to the pictures, as a visual comment or reaction to what I interpreted from Kathryn’s images. I present them here as they were originally, with no interference. To see how I interpreted them, one should look at the original pictures though the half-transparent pages present between each page containing the original. From my perspective, we can never truly meet another person, to deeply understand someone else, to experience life from within their shoes. I see this as a parallel to how we will never learn the absolute truth about reality, scientifically speaking. We can only keep getting closer and closer, without the hope of ever knowing the full picture. The semi-transparent tracing papers put over the original images are, in my opinion, a metaphor for our life experience. No matter how close we feel, we will never be able to fully integrate, to know the full picture. 22
Zofia Szczęsna - Bio
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? [1] What happens at the exact moment when matter collapses under itself and breaks classical laws of physics to become a singularity? What happens at the atomic level when matter is so dense that atoms nearly “touch” each other? How is it possible that there are objects in space as wide as Jupiter’s orbit? How small are we really when trying to grasp it all? Well, depending on the scale, probably extremely - but we can conduct research to answer these as well as many, many other questions. We can understand them from a distance - sometimes from thousands of lightyears away to the tiniest particle existing in the billions, all around us. Stellar matter is what drives me as an artist, it’s my main inspiration and the theme of many of my works.
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I’d describe myself as an interdisciplinary artist interested in what is out there physical properties of matter and space-time. I am fascinated mostly by astrophysics and the scientific process of discovering the closest truth about the physical world that we can possibly describe as human beings. In my art projects, I try to transfer scientific knowledge into various types of artworks that are impressions of physical discoveries. In some cases I’d say that some of my artworks become an illustration of some kind. Unlike many artists, I’m focused on how things are, not what we want or feel them to be. I graduated from Jan Matejko Academy Of Fine Arts In Krakow (Faculty of Graphic Arts) in 2014, where I made my masters diploma and thesis in the etching studio (“Pulsar. On the Edge of Singularity, from an Interdisciplinary Perspective”). The work was granted the medal of the rector and was marked as excellent. I have been a PhD candidate since 2014 and have been working at the Faculty of Graphic Arts since 2017 in Drawing Studio no. 2. Both in art practice and in art theory I am a researcher of the boundaries between art and science. I think of myself as a science geek with more and more solid foundations to read and understand professional scientific papers. In 2016 I was a guest resident at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
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in Heidelberg. In addition, I have worked with many astrophysics research institutions in both Poland and abroad. I have also had the pleasure of curating various art projects and exhibitions, at the same time remaining an active artist (participation in more than 60 exhibitions to date, 6 of them solo), researcher, and academic teacher. Recently I’ve become focused on brown dwarfs and degenerate stellar objects in general. I’m the author of many artbooks, one of them was exhibited at Central Booking in New York (2016). I wouldn’t describe myself as a printmaker specifically but rather as an artist, since I use many other media as well, though I am one from time to time, recently developing my own digital 3D printing technique.
zofia.szczesna@gmail.com http://szczesna.eu/
[1] - Richard Feynman, volume I; lecture 3, „The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences”; section 3-4, „Astronomy”; p. 3-6 124 76