Installing Gravity Shifts

Thank you to Rachel Bruya, Trent Miller, Rebecca Pettyjohn, Seth McClure, Bubbler volunteers Brian and Sarah and everyone else who helped to get this up on the walls!

studio a flutter

Much of the work for the upcoming show is moving through the studio now.  There will be few posts to follow as this will eat most of my remaining energies.

I have been posting pics of more work in progress on my twitter feed (@jlwineberg) using #studioshot and #gravityshifts.

Hoping that you will be able to see the working installed this July and August!

the more illustrious black hole

I would just like to document a few of the illustrations of black holes that I find compelling.

The one is an artist conception from NASA/JPL-Caltech showing a supermassive black hole at the center, surrounded by matter flowing onto the black hole in an accretion disk. This disk forms as the dust and gas in the galaxy falls onto the hole, attracted by its gravity:

It was used in a report on a recently discovered super massive black hole that is so super massive that it pokes a hole into the current theory on the growth of black holes, even.

Another artist conception focuses on a binary system where one star has collapsed into a black hole and eats its companion (a phenomena earlier referenced in this blog).   It is from the wikipedia entry on the accretion disc:

An actual image of the phenomena captured with the Hubble Telescope by L. Ferrarese of Johns Hopkins University and NASA is also listed in the same entry:

Other NASA concept drawings are available on the wikipedia commons.  This one focuses on the center of the accretion disc where the event horizon shows itself as the light sucking center of the formation leading to the singularity where all current theories are broken down into hints, whispers, conjectures and shrugs:

The last diagram, from a Inspirehep.net a high energy physics publication of a short article by Volker Beckmann (Francois Arago Centre / APC Paris) and Chris R. Shrader (NASA/GSFC), shows that Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) will look differently as differing angles of site.  Particularly interesting to me is the inclusion of one of the most compelling abstract shapes of all, the torus, here in cross-section representing the dusty absorber around the accretion disc:

0 G Space Art

On 4 April 1998, artist Frank Pietronigro flew aboard a NASA KC135 turbojet, often called the Vomit Comet, over the Gulf of Mexico from Houston’s Johnson Space Center and "experienced the awe-inspiring sensation of creating art in a microgravity environment as scientific research."

His his Research Project Number 34 was inspired by the Abstract Expressionist's famed experiments with gravity's effect on paint.  Carried out in free fall inside a kind of plastic tent, Pietronigro's "drift paintings" caught the serendipitous and spontaneous flow of the paint released from pastry tubes in the microgravity environment without the structural support of a traditional horizontally oriented canvas.  

Ah . . ., so much for the days when NASA had a budget for Abstract Expressionism in space.

Pietronigro continued to pursue art in microgravity by co-founding the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium in 2003, an international space art organization committed to increasing artists’ access to microgravity environments including parabolic flights and the International Space Station.

Melting Ice means Gravity Shift for Antartica

Somehow I missed this Slate article published last fall that reported on the European Space Agency's conclusion that loss of ice between 2009 and 2012 caused a dip in the gravity field over the West Antartica:

Though we all learned in high-school physics that gravity is a constant, it actually varies slightly depending on where you are on the Earth’s surface and the density of the rock (or, in this case, ice) beneath your feet. During a four-year mission, the ESA satellite mapped these changes in unprecedented detail and was able to detect a significant decrease in the region of Antarctica where land ice is melting fastest.

The change may not be not felt by the average penguin, but the changing water level, coast lines and weather patterns brought about by the melting ice is being felt by us all.

Alison's Shifting Center of Gravity

My wife told me recently that one of the most remarkable experiences of gravity she had was during her pregnancies, the shift in her center of gravity, the extra weight causing her to renegotiate her body's sense of balance, effecting her sleeping patterns, daily commute, the picking up fallen objects, etc.  I have fond memories of watching her work out her new and constantly changing balance.  I found this photo of her being swung in a hammock by my daughter, two days before she delivered our 10 pound son, two weeks after his due date:

A new center . . .

Gravity

The world had a new center
And that center was you
As I walked the night away
Peering down into the glittering night sky
I felt I was floating
And all that kept me tethered
From falling into that great abyss
Was the gravity of my love for you. 

-emily sha

Working Silhouettes

Studio shot of working silhouettes

Hand in the universe

At the other end of Caleb Scharf's book on gravity at it's most intense he sums up the relevance of some of the largest and most powerful structures in the universe to our own existence.  He recaps his descriptions of how black holes are not just the simple uncomplicated dents in space time you and I thought they were, but are the most efficient means the universe has of converting matter to energy, working like electrical batteries to power and shape galaxies and create the conditions for our own existence:

Take a look at your hand.  It contains atoms of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen that were forged a million miles below the surface of another star billions of years ago.  Your hand also contains hydrogen that was present at the very beginning of the universe.  All these elements have felt the presence of black holes.  Right now, a tiny fraction of the vast electromagnetic sea of photons racing through the universe is reaching down through our own atmosphere, hitting the ancient atoms of your flesh.  Some of these photons originate in the fearsome spinning of matter around black homes, or from the jets of particles rushing at near light speed out into the cosmos.  We are awash in their radiation, but it is nothing new to the atoms in your hand.  As the cosmic dark ages lifted 13 billion years ago, some of the primordial hydrogen in your body was likely buffeted and tickled by the radiation of feeding black holes.  Billions of years later, the stars that built your heavy elements existed because of the history of gravity and energy in one zone of what was becoming the Milky Way galaxy.

Black Holes and Dams

For some stories of gravity at its most intense I have been checking out Caleb Scharf's Gravity's Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos.  For such mind blowing subject matter it turns out to be a pretty good read, partially because he can find metaphors for the phenomena he describes that the reader reader can intuitively grasp.  The Hoover Dam is one such metaphor.  Scharf calls it a "temple of gravity":

The enormous forms of concrete and steel are poised in space and time, feeding off the energy of the Colorado River as it squeezes through the gorge.  The dam is much more than a great engineering feat; it feels profoundly connected to the hidden glue and threads binding the universe together.

He continues to use the dam as a way introduce the reader to the mind bending effects of gravity on scales impossible to image, bolstering his metaphor with the star map set in the floor beneath the winged sentinels representing the republic.  The positions of the stars depicted in the map point to the exact date the dam was dedicated by President Roosevelt.  These kind of connections root his descriptions and allow us to follow him to the edges of our perceptions and well beyond our everyday understanding of how things work.

Story Sketches

As I have explained this project to friends and family a few of them have relayed their own remarkable experiences with gravity.  Below are a few working sketches of some of their stories.

Falling Tiger Dream

An episode from a dream I had on 7/30/2014:

It is discovered that tigers secret an enzyme that is somehow powerful enough to dominate the world.  Many countries race to gather the enzyme.  It is discovered that tigers only secret the enzyme while they are free falling or floating outside earth gravitational pull.  Scientist team up with skydivers to run a program of tiger enzyme secretion harvest that involves parachuting tigers tandem with scientist, who then extract blood when falling and harvest the enzyme from the blood they gather.

- Jeremy