The cosmic pandulum , made out of a concave mirror, representing cosmic time, is almost still, thus referring to our perception of outer space as a calm and vast landscape. As the viewer moves around, the reflections in the mirror appear distorted.
The pendulum mirrors used in the LIGO Observatory to detect gravitational waves have been the inspiration of this piece. These objects , also called silent mirrors, are static pendulums designed to reflect a laser beam used to detect gravitational waves (a fluctuation in the space-time curve that propagates like a wave). In 2016, LIGO and Virgo Collaboration Scientific made the first direct observation of the gravitational waves generated by the merging of two black holes at ca. 1 billion light years from Earth, an extremely important moment in science, which was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in 2017.
Part of Timescapes: from Clock to Outerspace, Art&Science residence.
Three types of pendulums: human, Earth and astral compose this piece. Their movement pattern describes the temporal landscape of the space it refers to.
The Earth pendulum in this image, made out of rock, refers to geological time. Its movements are chaotic and unpredictable, in alignment with how geological events seem to occur, especially earthquakes. This pendulum was inspired by the seismic pendulum in Grotta Gigante, Trieste. The mechanism used is a depiction of The Chaos Theory, a branch of mathematics focusing on the behaviour of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.
Part of Timescapes: from Clock to Outerspace
The starting point of this work was the pendulum, an object that is used in science and in everyday life to measure very different phenomena and frequencies.
I chose three types of pendulum to illustrate how their behaviour speaks about the following temporal landscape :
human, Earth/geological and cosmic time.
The one in the image , a clock pendulum, represents human time. Its movement are regular, fast and mechanical. The object is made out of a golden mirror, thus the viewer can watch himself watching time pass by.
