A sensing grid of LED lights visually decode the sound pattern across a surface at more than 100 points
Sound and music has the effect of physically organising the air molecules into meaningful field patterns.
My research creates generative dynamic images of the emergence of pattern formation in acoustic and bioelectromagnetic fields: human, plant, animal, biofilms… could they hold the secrets to the invisible and intangible factors that lie beyond human perception and elude our senses – like those that affect our thoughts and emotions, and hearts and minds.
A Quantum (or Quanta) is the smallest quantity of radiant energy. The energy increases in fixed steps. All fields are made of quanta at the subatomic level… we could say everything is made of dots or squares, or spheres or cubes: quantised fields are like a giant immaterial lego construction.
It’s interesting that ancient arts are often composed of intertwined repeating motifs. The Australian Aboriginal paintings are typically composed of clouds of dots, without any geometrical perspective: proportion, horizon or vanishing points.
Their representation of space is not a continuum but discrete, represented by small unit ‘cells’, and as a whole reveals a complex pattern of links and connections.
Paths and places are identified as changing patterns, densities and colours of the dots – they depict the story of the reality of the world in which the artist believes – an immaterial world consisting of ‘sacred’ energy.
In Aboriginal culture (one of the most ancient), paintings are composed to depict secret knowledge, the patterns are codes, and unintelligible except to individuals having attained a certain level of initiation. Each sacred place depicted holds unique knowledge.
It’s a relatively recent discovery in modern science that space is made up of quantum fields: discrete units of energy, and we that we can measure the quantity at each point (dot if you like) and visualise the entire field and the patterns of its propagation, its dynamics, its ‘secret’ information.
I imagine the whole of space as a beautiful blue-tiled clear swimming pool. When the water is perfectly still, it’s invisible and the grid of tiles stand out in perfect geometry. We can think of these tiles as our ‘unit cells’ in a discrete model of space.
As we know, when we disturb the pool, a wave propagates outwards, and we can see this invisible wave because our field ‘tiles’ change their shape and density of colour: the overall visual pattern changes continuously in time.
But unlike the water waves themselves, the patterns in the tiles are not a continuum; like Aboriginal painting, they visualise the propagation of invisible energy, and information at each point.
Meta-patterns
If we continue to disturb the water in the pool, the original square shapes of the tiles will be unidentifiable. The motion in our swirling pool patterns probably looks a bit chaotic – hard to find any ordered repetitive pattern at all. Even though if we could recreate all the patterns that went into the sum of it we would surely see the order. Like the poetic signature question of chaotic behaviour: can a butterfly flapping its wings cause a storm? We can look for a meta-pattern in these fields – a strange attractor, a butterfly, a phoenix that arises from the ashes; an island of tranquility, a stable pattern – and tile-by-tile remove the veil.
The field patterns of our collective engagement in the immaterial world can be visualised at every tile (or point) of space over time. My artwork places sensors in space arranged in lattice structures. Each sensor measures the density of the field at each tile – to find the collective patterns and turns it into dynamic coloured lights that dance through time.