New Media Gallery in New West presents Indivisible

Humankind has spent centuries questioning its place: ‘why are we here?’, ‘what is our purpose?,’ and ‘where are we going?’ are just some of the thoughts we’ve used to reflect on our position in the universe. 

Imagine if you could add an unseen layer to it – unseen, until now. 

Indivisible, presented by the New Media Gallery (NMG), utilizes the senses and the mind, creatively drawing from some of the most unexpected places. Would you call radio waves beautiful? Is there art in an algorithm? Can the rays that come off a supernova be as pretty as a picture?

This way of seeing is now a possibility thanks to Indivisible, which is on until August 14. Artists include Richard Vijgen of The Netherlands, Yunchul Kim of Korea, Semiconductor of the UK, and Ralf Baecker of Germany. These pieces provide another layer of existential questioning through their work. 

“For my piece, it’s basically a projection machine that is based on two or three components,” explains Baecker. “The starting point is a magnetic field sensor called a flux gate magnetometer, which picks up the changes of the Earth’s magnetic field.”

The result: a ruby red projection of a variety of waves cast onto a wall. The piece is incredibly striking; it has to be seen in a dark, separate room – you’re also able to walk past the machines as they work to read activity from the sun.

“The data is kind of like a dream, or a hallucination of what it has seen. So, it takes this and sends it to the production machine that creates the image,” Baecker says. “This machine is not a classical projector that you’d see in other art exhibitions, or cinema. The image is created by changing or bending a mirror.” 

By the time the machine puts together every single wave of activity, it’s as if you’re viewing an ever-changing landscape of peaks and valleys. 

While we might not think of the connection between art and science immediately, Baecker says it’s there.

“Imagination is, I think, what scientists and artists share. Thinking beyond what’s, for instance, considered in a traditional aesthetical instance [to be] water, what is our understanding of the world?” Baecker believes both also share an interest to tell stories about the world we live in. 

As is the case with his fellow artists, Baecker hopes these pieces will open new doors to the way we try to make sense of the universe. “Perhaps they’re having a moment of, ‘what is happening?’ ‘What am I doing here?’ ”

While the pieces can be complex, Baecker says the viewer only needs to take a moment to find themselves in the art. 

“You’ll go out thinking, ‘I had a really interesting experience at an aesthetic level.’ It’s like kicking off those thought processes and having some interesting conversations…kind of like the way you’d talk about a film afterwards,” he says. 

About the artists and their pieces

Richard Vijgen: Vijgen’s piece is a live visualization of the radio spectrum. The exhibit at NMG uses purples and cyans over a dark background to track how radio waves are moving locally. What you end up seeing is a panoramic visualization of amplitude over time, or, as many who took a look at the piece said, “something that appears to have come out of the Matrix.” 

Yunchul Kim: Kim’s piece uses Gelger Müller tube, glass, aluminum and a micro controller to process cosmic rays. The result is a series of flashing lights each time the rays of a supernova come into contact with the piece. Upon viewing the piece, I noted that the item looked like something out of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) – it turned out it was made with the help of scientists there! 

Semiconductor: Through the AEgIS* is a space-timelapse which explores how we make sense of nature through the language of science. The images you see were captured through the AEgIS experiment at CERN; at the time, it was looking at how antimatter responds to gravity. What you end up seeing may remind you of stars in the night sky, or even of something you might see under a microscope. 

Ralf Baecker: Baecker's piece uses a fluxgate magnetometer to register the magnetic field of the Earth. That gets fed into an algorithm that ‘dreams’ variations of the signal. In turn, the signals become a two-dimensional matrix that transforms a thin mirror sheet by 48 muscle wire actors. The surface of the mirror sheet changes analog to the system’s state. What you end up seeing is something that resembles peaks and valleys, depending on the reading.