Particle Post: Letters from the Universe
Here is another project which highlights the discourse between art and science to inspire you to think - and feel - outside the box. Our long-term resident Umut Kose collaborated with three other artists, Yuri Tanaka, Pavle Dinulović, and Chris Bruckmayr on this sensory piece of art that is powered by the infinitely small.
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We are all in constant correspondence with the universe. It speaks to us ever so subtly, showering us with invisible remnants of our mutual distant past, across the magnitude of space and time. Yet in the infinitely grand scale of all things universal, one tends to neglect the infinitely small.
It is this omnipresent chronicle of the universe that is our most intimate connection to the everywhere and always, shared with us through the smallest of postcards and parcels. Within the journey of each travelling particle there lies a piece of a common history, a memoir of a voyage spanning billions of years, connecting us, in this very point in space and time, to the dawn of our universe.
Receiving cosmic muons (one of the fundamental particles constantly created by the interactions of the cosmic rays at the top of the atmosphere) through a scintillator detector, this postbox subtly emits sound and light as a direct consequence of every particle it detects. It is through this process that the implied aesthetics of the unperceivable are explored, as are the means by which it could be indirectly appreciated in different ways through the bodies and minds of humans.
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Further references linked to this project:
Paper: Acta Astronautica, Volume 186, September 2021, Pages 445 – 450
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.06.014
Video: https://vimeo.com/468935298
Image credits: Yuri Tanaka, Pavle Dinulović, Umut Kose, Chris Bruckmayr