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In the physical sciences, entanglement refers to sets of data that cannot be described independently of one another. In a more general sense, it refers to a complicated relationship or complex situation. It can be very useful in describing interdisciplinary inquiry, as well.
Artist Janet Biggs, mathematician Agnieszka Międlar, and physicist Daniel Tapia Takaki, who leads the University of Kansas’s (KU) team for the ALICE collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), are collaborating on a project that uses time-based media to explore questions in high energy physics and applies novel mathematical techniques to the production of video and performance. Supported by the Integrated Arts Research Initiative (IARI) at the Spencer Museum of Art at KU, this is the first inquiry from IARI whose interdisciplinary group of collaborators aims to produce work collectively.
-from the Spencer Museum of Art (website)
Projected imagery and sound were produced from prompts given to collective member Janet Biggs. The prompts include Time, Entanglement, Fundamental and Dimensionality. Video images of lunar and solar eclipses merge and entangle with images of detection devices at CERN, dancers moving as if in micro gravities, and Antarctic glaciers calving under the weight of time and humanity. Using algebraic computations of data, such as the singular value decomposition (SVD) which is often used in quantum mechanics, collective members Meidlar and Tapia Takaki analyzed Biggs’ footage and produced new video imagery in lower rank dimensions. These low-dimension versions were reincorporated back into the installation, creating a multidimensional projection.
Inspired by SVD, the exhibition sound track was composed by music technologist, Richard Savery, as three separate lower-dimension approximations or melodies, played on violin, viola, and cello, that combine in the exhibition space to construct a higher-dimension composition.
-from abstract written by Biggs
