A FLY LEADS INTO THE VACUUM

 

The approach to well known paradigms of Mathematics and its translation into Visual Arts, opened to me a new field of research, posing more questions and offering various ways of understanding such concepts as time, present, movement, space etc., phenomena that are normally accepted in everyday life, but are in fact, extremely complicated, strange and fascinating. These questions motivated me to research further and explore new problems and paradigms within the realms of physics, whereby I concentrated on materializing them through visual arts.

“The Fly” is a stop-motion film and is my first approximation in this field. The purpose of this project was to use concepts borrowed from physics, not illustrate them but rather explore them by making them part of the language of Visual Arts.

My intention to do animation was not just to give a well done illusion of moving pictures: what I wanted to do is to use it as a tool to investigate the concepts of time and movement and their possibilities. The artist must have particularity to create the physical rules of their film and produce its own time in discrete units of pictograms.

The subject is an explanation of “how the fly flies”, and is actually based on an article about fruit flies’ manoeuvres (2). Although the film attempts to give an answer, the narrator collides with different knowledge paradoxes, falling into contradictions and thereby hindering more and more each explanation. The result is more questions rather than answers.

In fact, the film is about “uncertainty” and the questions raised during the film lead to the concept of vacuum. The final  sequence consists of a large illustration of Vacuum – a vacuum full of objects.

This illustration was inspired by conversations about vacuum energy or dark energy and multiverses with a physicist friend of mine. In addition, I have attended several conferences and done my own research on these issues.

This picture is at the end of the film, but for me it is the starting point for a new stage of exploration. The drawing has already become an independent artwork, as my physicist friend (with whom I discussed nothingness) is now using it and some of my other pictures in seminars and lectures on theoretical physics at the University of Chile.

My challenge now is to find new mechanisms to represent physical concepts that are impossible to visualize or represent using standard language, and, as an artist, I plan to develop these concepts in the future.

 

 

References:
1. L’ arrêt impossible, Procc. Colloque de Cerisy,in “Déterminismes et complexités: autour deHenri Atlan”,Recherches, La decouverte, pp 77- 82, P. Bourgine et al eds, Paris , 2008.

2. The Aerodynamics of Free-Flight Maneuvers in Drosophila, Steven N. Fry et al. 300 Science 495 (2003); DOI: 10.1126/science.1081944