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

Forceful companion eating

Science writer Brian Clegg details some large scale effects of gravity on bianary star systems:

"When binary stars are relatively close together,  the tidal forces each star can produce are considerable. Unlike planets, stars aren't solid, so often this results in plumes of stellar material being ripped from one star by the tidal forces and collected by the other as it forcefully eats its companion."

from Gravity, 2012

Macfarlane on Border Crossings

In Robert Macfarlane's recent book The Old Ways, he accounts for walks on paths as old human movement itself.  One such path he writes about is the Broomway, a notorious tidal path off the Essex coast of England:

We lack - we need - a term for those places where one experiences a 'transition' from a known landscape onto  . . . somewhere we feel and think significantly differently.  I have for sometime been imagining them as 'border crossings'.  These borders do not correspond to national boundaries, and papers and documents are unrequired at them.  Their traverse is generally unbiddable, and no reliable maps exists of their routes and outlines.  They exist even in familiar landscapes, there when you cross a certain watershed, treeline or snowline, or when you enter rain, storm or mist, or pass from boulder clay into sand, or chalk into greenstone.  Such movements are rites of passage that reconfigure local geographies leaving known places outlandish or quickened, revealing continents within countries . . . .

That hour, walking out - back - into Doggerland, was an hour I will never forget.  We did not know where the sand would slacken to mud, and yet somehow it never felt dangerous or rash.  The tide would hold it out and we had two hours in which to discover this vast revealed world: no more than two hours, for sure, but surely no less.  The serenity of the space through which we moved calmed me to the point of invulnerability, and thus we walked on.  A mile out, the white mist still hovered, and in the haze I started to perceive impossible forms and shapes: a fleet of Viking longboats with high lug rigged square sails; a squadron of fulucca, dhows and sgoths; cityscapes (the skyline of Istanbul, the profile of Houses of Parliament).  When I looked back, the coast line was all but imperceptible and it was apparent that our footprints had been erased behind us, and so we splashed timelessly on out into the tidal mist.  It felt at that moment unarguable that a horizon line might exert as potent a pull on the mind as a mountains summit.

here, ink and silverleaf on paper, book page from collaborative project with artist Teresa Getty

The Doggerland to which MacFarlane refers was an area of land that connected Great Britain to mainland Europe during and after the last Ice Age. It was then gradually flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500 or 6,200 BC. and now lies under the southern North Sea.  So, the moon's gravitational pull not only allows pedestrian travel on otherwise unwalkable paths to islands off the coast of Essex, it allows for time travel as well.

Pick me up, from Unemployed Philosopher's Guild

Silverstein on Falling Up

Falling Up

I tripped on my shoelace

And I fell up -

Up to the roof tops,

Up over the town, 

Up past the tree tops,

Up over the mountains, 

Up where the colors

Blend into the sounds.

But it got me so dizzy

When I looked around, 

I got sick to my stomach

And I threw down.

 - Shel Silverstein 

Murakami on Two Moons

"No doubt about it: there were two moons.

"One was the moon that had always been there, and the other was a far smaller greenish moon, somewhat lopsided in shape, and much less bright.   It looked like a poor, ugly, distantly related child that had been foisted on the family by unfortunate events and was welcome by no one.  but it was undeniable there, neither a phantom or an optical illusion, hanging in space like other heavenly bodies, a solid mass with a clear cut outline.  Not a plane, not a blimp, not an artificial satellite, not a paper-mâché moon that someone had made for fun.  It was without a doubt a chunk of rock, having quietly, stubbornly settled on a position in the night sky, like a punctuation mark placed after long deliberation or a mole bestowed by destined.
     Tengo stared at the moon for a long time as if to challenge it, never averting his gaze, hardly even blinking.  But no matter how long he kept his eyes locked on it, it refused to budge.  It stayed hunkered down in its spot in the sky with silent, stone-hearted tenacity. . . .

"The sights of the two moons gave Tengo a slight dizzy feeling, as if it had put his nervous system out of balance.  He sat down on the the top of the slide. Leaning against the handrail, and closed his eyes, fighting the dizziness.  He felt as if the force of gravity around him had subtly changed.  Somewhere the ride was rising, and somewhere else the tide was receding.  Their faces devoid of expression, people were moving back and forth between "insane" and "lunatic."

- Haruki Murakami, from 1Q84

Greetings!

This is a blog by artist Jeremy Wineberg that seeks to collect stories about gravity.  Do you have an interesting story involving the force of gravity?  Caught in a tide?  have a tragic fall?  attracted to something massive?  Do you do scientific research that involves the force of gravity?  Does your writing involve a sense of gravity?  We are actively soliciting stories and personal anecdotes from what ever micro, macro, or individual scale you inhabit.  Be they heavy or light, funny, serious, poignant, truthful, scientifically significant, or entirely invented, they can be emailed to artshiftsgravity@gmail.com to be included on this blog.  Illustrations from these stories will collide kaleidoscopically in the upcoming exhibition Gravity Shifts in cooperation with the Bubbler at the Madison Central Library in July of 2015.