Jeweled Net of the Vast Invisible is a multi-media installation based on my collaboration as a visual artist with two University of Michigan colleagues, astrophysicist Gregory Tarlé and composer Stephen Rush. Together we created a visual simulation and sonic landscape based on data from the Millennium Simulation, computationally derived information about ten billion dark matter particles in a cube the size of the entire visible universe. Through our digitally derived translations we represented that which is imperceptible even at wavelengths beyond the optical spectrum, a force that nevertheless captures the jewels of light, the stars and galaxies that are visible in our heavens.
Our title suggests parallels between the science on which our project is based and metaphoric images from ancient Hindu cosmology, notably Indra’s Net, evoking the emptiness and interpenetration of all phenomena. Before digital innovations, information about the fundamental nature of the universe was accessible to non-specialists primarily by metaphor, visual analogy, and narrative. Using digital technology, clusters of dark matter have become clusters of information in our computers. Visualizing them transforms data into something we can directly experience through our own physical perceptions.
The result of our collaboration was first featured in 2014, as a twenty-foot high, 140-degree panoramic projection and acoustic environment immersing viewers in the vast jeweled spaces simulating the distribution of dark matter, as if we had left the earth and were flying through it. Rush’s resonant soundscape conjured the vast distances of our project, associating them with sacred spaces evoked by Hindu sonic traditions.
In a 2015 installation, viewers were transported through a simulation of dark matter in process of evolving from a nearly uniform distribution soon after the Big Bang to the distribution that characterizes our universe at the present epoch. This installation coincided with the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration Meeting bringing 150 scientists from around the globe to our university campus. DES was conducting a multi-year photometric survey on the Blanco telescope in Chile, mapping the southern skies to understand the nature of dark energy that now dominates our universe.
In 2022-2023, Jeweled Net was again installed as part of my solo exhibition Hands, Nets, and Other Devices, at the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in Santo Tirso, Portugal, which occupies the repurposed 17th century Benedictine Monastery of Sao Bento, a national heritage site. The exhibition was a response to the museum’s permanent collection of archaeological artifacts and was a conversation with the architecture of the building itself, exploring visual and thematic territory at the intersection of cosmology, art, architecture, and archaeology. I installed adhesive vinyl images based on artifacts from Portugal and the ancient Mediterranean on walls and windows throughout the museum, including oversize glass vitrines housing the museum’s archaeological collection.
Jeweled Net occupied one large gallery, while a hemispherical version of that video, first produced for a planetarium, was projected as a glowing disc at one end of the long monastery corridor, like a rose window at the end of human time. Fragments from Jeweled Net were subversively layered into the museum’s archaeological videos running continuously on monitors outside the permanent galleries. Another museum gallery featured a grid of vinyl images inspired by Portuguese tiles, an array of compositions from my anthropomorphic alphabet transcribing a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Cuncta fluunt, omnisque uagans formatur imago.” All things flow, and every image is a wandering form.
To design this exhibition, I took objects from different societies with fundamentally different assumptions about what it means to be human and put them in dialogue with one another, suggesting identities radically different from what they appear to be while on display in museum collections. And those new identities are themselves unstable. Following their metamorphoses is essential to the pleasures in my piece and part of its content, a reminder that the whole project is about unstable meanings. At a cosmological level, it is an acknowledgement that everything we know, including ourselves, is constituted by the same cosmic dust that originated at the singular moment that our universe formed, in a continual state of dissolution and reconstitution ever since.
The issues we faced in creating Jeweled Net of the Vast Invisible are inherent in all cosmological visions: the problem of making the awe inspiring accessible to human perception without trivializing it; giving it a dimension that we can, if not understand, at least experience without reducing it to our scale. My INSAP presentation will feature slides and video samples from the installations and a discussion of the trans-disciplinary inspirations for these projects.
