WEAVING THE UNIVERSE FROM ATOMS TO STARS
An art-science collaboration with professor Arthur I. Miller
“Weaving the Universe: From Atoms to Stars” originates from a unique collaboration between an artist and a scientist. This unusual approach requires that the artist strives to understand scientific concepts and the scientist is willing to examine nature from an artistic point of view. It seeks to evoke the ambiguity and beauty of the cosmos in the large – black holes and wormholes – and in the small – atoms, electrons and light quanta – while exploring the human mind, the means by which we imagine these strange worlds.”
Atoms
This work is a result of a collaboration with Professor Arthur I. Miller, based on our conversations and material that I read.
I created a series of illustrations that display the journey of the scientists: Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman that led to the discovery of the wave/particle duality. At the same time, it represents my journey of understanding and discovering the art behind the science.
Stars
Artists use mathematical models of black holes developed from data taken by space telescopes to give us some idea of what these mysterious objects actually look like. They have produced amazing images of objects which are impossible to perceive and enormously far away from us. But what has been missing are visual representations that evoke their frightening grandeur and the poetry behind them. Towards that goal we worked together, in an artist-scientist collaboration. We aim to explore representations of nature that go beyond scientific visualisations.
The Universe Within The Strange Collaboration of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung: When Physics Met Psychology
For this part of the project, I created a series of illustrations of Pauli’s dreams and visions as interpreted by Jung. The Dreams of Wolfgang Pauli are based on our conversations and Arthur’s book Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung.
Text by Arthur I. Miller:
How could a seemingly austere scientist – Wolfgang Pauli – dare to explore the dark and mysterious land of dreams while searching for a common language to communicate effectively with a psychologist – Carl Jung?
At a key time in his scientific development, Pauli was undergoing analysis by Jung. What can we learn about Pauli and his scientific discoveries from Jung’s analysis of his dreams?
Jung’s method of dream analysis involved comparison of a patient’s dream images with images from alchemy. As a result of Jung’s psychoanalysis, Pauli came to realise the source of his creative powers as well as a way to alleviate his neurosis.
The strange friendship that resulted between Pauli and Jung is a wonderful example of how a collaboration across disciplines can work out, ultimately unlocking creative ideas.
