Touching the Universe: Backyard Science Projects in Contemporary Art

There is an interesting parallel between astronomy’s growth in technical abilities to reach further and further into the depths of the expanding universe and art’s ambitions in creating expansive images of the same. The Webb and Euclid telescopes are providing us with images not even the Hubble could have imagined, if it could. Artists, for their part, are no longer content to simply produce images of the sun, for example, they are finding ways to recreate it. Science’s technological explosion is paralleled by an equally ambitious, albeit minor, technological arms race in the arts. There is a paradox to all this in that the further we reach out the more inaccessible the universe becomes, it loses something of its reality, let alone for most of us the night has become “unvisible” and cluttered with artificial bodies launched to make our lives a minute fraction different. This paper looks at contemporary art’s attempts at recreating the universe, focusing mostly on large scale installations like Olafur Eliasson’s Double Sunset (1999) and The Weather Project (2003), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Solar Equation (2010), Angela Bulloch’s Night Sky (Mercury and Venus) (2010) and Katie Paterson’s Totality (2016). These works reveal, each in their own way, contemporary art’s attempts at conveying the growing changes in technology, our understanding of the universe, and how it all reflects back on ourselves.

Speakers
John Hatch

Schedule Speaker List

INSAP 2024

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