EC EVENT 1: CLOUD CHAMBERS

On the 29th I attended Christopher O'Leary's lecture about his project "Cloud Chambers." He shared about his early interest in photography, and his practice of Datamoshing to hack photos, interacting with the surface of the photo, and creating digital garbage that became art when looked at from afar. As a computer scientist, I've never seen code and art so well intertwined before, so I really enjoyed Christopher's work.

My favorite was his rendering of the black hole, which was also generated through code. The black hole also had wave-like sounds, which goes back to my previous post on "Senses + Perception," where I noted that even space makes sound. His black hole was somehow mesmerizing, especially with the way the blue, pink, and red spun into each other, and the spirals in the middle. I enjoyed the way he combined physics, code, and art all together and his work is inspiration for the kind of work i would like to do in the future.

Video: Black Hole Rendition

O'Leary also showed us and interesting exhibit in the Griffith Observatory called the "Cloud Chamber" that was his inspiration for his project. The exhibit consists of matter running in a box, and cosmic rays, sun particles, and radiation magnetizes the vapor as it passes the chamber and is able to "render the invisible" as O'Leary strives to do with his work. Embarrassingly, I must have missed this exhibit when I went to the Griffith Observatory, but it definitely seems like a magical process worth seeing. 

Going off the theme of "rendering the invisible," O'Leary also went to look at a dark matter detector, or "time projection machine." The machine contained thin threads of steel that were supposed to catch the dark matter as it passed by causing electrons to fire off. His photograph of the machine is a beautiful capture of science, and truly looks like a time machine out of a science fiction movie.

Sources:

"Christopher O'Leary." Christopher O'Leary. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 July 2014. <http://cargocollective.com/chrisoleary/>.

"Datamoshing." Know Your Meme News. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 July 2014. <http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/datamoshing>.

"Edge of Space Mezzanine." Griffith Observatory. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 July 2014. <http://www.griffithobservatory.org/exhibits/bedgeofspace.html>.

O'Leary, Christopher. "Black Hole Animation." Vimeo. N.p., 2013. Web. 29 July 2014. <http://vimeo.com/64747163>.

"The Allen Telescope Array." SETI Institute. SETI Institute, n.d. Web. 29 July 2014. <http://www.seti.org/ata>.