Entangled Strings

ANOTHER DIMENSION

Saturday 9/10 - Woke to a warm clear day in Geneva. Took the tram from Cornevin Station (which somehow houses the Swiss-France border crossing) to CERN, home of the world's most powerful 'atom smasher' - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). An $8 billion particle accelerator in a 17-mile circular tunnel buried 150-500 feet under the Swiss-French countryside. More than 10,000 researchers from 20 member nations searching for the deepest mysteries of the universe. . .We're here because the Lab just recently announced an intriguing Digital Artist award called Collide@CERN that I intend to apply for next month. Winning artist spends expenses-paid three-month in residence in spring 2012.  Seems like a perfect fit with the current focus of my work . Nanci and I took a fascinating three-hour guided tour of the complex. . .then a delightful lunch and conversation on Lake Geneva with UoM researcher, Yuichi Kubota, who been at CERN for a year. I took this shot of Nanci's finger . . what an aura! Off by HS train to Milan-Florence-Tuscany tomorrow. Then six nights in a villa near Casole d' Elsa with friends. Can finally unpack (and wash some clothes) from our carry-ons. Believe it or not, Nanci has become a super-light packer and nary a broken nail!

A CULTURE BLUR

Friday (9/9)  Crepes for breakfast in Reykjavik, lunch in Paris (@CDG :), pandimonium in Gare Lyon Part Deux,  then a late steak frites dinner in Geneva. . .A day of planes, trains (TGV) and trams. Lush countryside, quaint villages, a waxing moon behind Mont Blanc over Lake Geneva. No worse for the wear. (G)

RECENT EXHIBIT: Entangled Strings - 11/2/09 - 1/8/10

For more than forty years, Gary Smaby’s artistic eye has peered through a camera lens; capturing memorable images that run the gamut from classic portraiture to experimental new media. He has trained his lens on an eclectic range of subjects: from legendary rock stars and Nobel laureates to breathtaking landscapes from the Himalaya to the Serengeti. His acclaimed body of work has been variously featured on gallery walls, album jackets, as well on the web and in publications like The New Yorker.

Over that same span, Smaby has also been an oft-quoted observer at the leading edge of Western science and technology, as well as an ardent practitioner of the Eastern contemplative science of meditation. His latest work is a fusion of these oppositional influences; inspired by a methodology for intellectual inquiry that is surprisingly favored by both ancient Buddhist monks and contemporary quantum physicists when pondering metaphysical phenomena that can neither be seen nor experimentally confirmed.  Smaby used this shared technique, called the thought experiment,  to artfully blend three divergent and uniquely personal mind streams:  his insightful understanding of contemporary science, his direct experience with Raja Yoga and Zen meditation and his artistic gift for visual improvisation. 

For his thought experiments, Smaby previsualized how ordinary, every-day things might appear if the quantum uncertainty theorized by particle physicists at extremes of the infinitesimally tiny and unimaginably galactic were to prevail at the macrocosmic scale we call reality.   In other words, how might our perception of ordinary things be altered if the ‘immutable’ laws of Newton and Einstein are indeed as impermanent and illusionary as professed by Buddhist scholars for millennia? 

While the show’s title, "Entangled Strings" is a conjunction formed from two mind-numbing theories in high-energy physics - entanglement and superstrings;  it is the unseen spiritual dimension that imbues Smaby’s evocatively abstract photographs with a luminous and mystical essence.