Planck rumours will soon become Planck results

On Thursday, the Planck satellite will be revealing its first cosmological results. In terms of fundamental physics, this will be the biggest event since the Higgs discovery last year. In the cosmology community it is the biggest event for the best part of a decade (possibly in both directions of time). If you don't follow cosmology too closely, you might wonder why this particular experiment might generate so much excitement. After all, aren't there all sorts of experiments, all of the time?

If so, I hope you've come to the right place.

The sky as seen by Planck in 2010. Only, they hadn't removed the foregrounds yet. There's a whole Milky Way galaxy in the way. Why must they make us wait so long?

If you're unaware, Planck is a satellite put in space by the European Space Agency to measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB is an incredibly useful source of cosmological information. The impending release of Planck's results on Thursday is big news because Planck has measured the CMB with better resolution than any other experiment that can see the whole sky. Planck might have discovered evidence of interesting new physics, such as extra neutrinos or additional types of dark matter. It might even reveal some effects relating to how physics works at energies we could never probe on Earth. But even if it hasn't discovered anything dramatically new, the precision with which Planck has measured the parameters of the standard cosmological model will immediately make it the new benchmark.

There have been surprisingly few rumours leaked to the rest of the cosmology community about what to expect on Thursday. This has resulted in the most pervasive rumour being that they have simply not found anything worth leaking. Whatever the reality, on Thursday rumours will become results.

What has Planck actually done that is so interesting?

Senses of Science

Four months ago I wrote a post about wonder in an attempt to sketch out the aspirational mood of this blog (or at least my sense of it). In six week increments since I’ve metaphorically returned to that mood and tried to make its implications more concrete by mapping out the actual directions that thinking about wonder and new lines of disciplinary mingling have led my own research: first, into the domain of science film, and second, into postulations about this genre within a critical category I called ‘the impossible image.’

So come December, I’ve decided to take the opportunity for reflection provided by the end of a calendar year and circle back to wonder, backlit by a sense of some things I’ve learned from this multi-directional conversation thus far. The hero of this post is an out-and-out iconoclast: the scientist and Surrealist filmmaker Jean Painlevé, whose six-decade career was devoted to the intertwining of science and art on every level. A biologist trained in the Laboratoire d’Anatomie et d’Histologie Comparée at the Sorbonne, Painlevé was an avant-garde photographer and filmmaker who penned countless texts, reviews, polemics, and manifestos; was politically active during and beyond the Second World War; and initiated a scientific film institute dedicated to supporting and disseminating science film well before the nexus of art and science was comprehended as a serious topic.

underwater bricolage: Jean Painlevé with his diving gear
"Everything is the center of the world. I'm forced to be multicentric."

Best of all, Painlevé is a humorist. His mesmerizing films and delicate photographs, chatty texts and sparking interviews give us a way to concretize a subtle quality of the aesthetics of wonder—the significance of pleasure in the strangeness and surprising beauty of the natural world. The mood of his contribution to the history of our topic seems to me perfectly encapsulated in Foucault's riff on discovery and the affects of wonder:

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes "care"; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.

 

Leonardo: A Painter at the Court of Milan, for the Twenty-First Century

Study of Arms and Hands, c. 1474

Study of a Woman, c. 1490

Earlier this month, one of those once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions opened in London: Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. It runs at the National Gallery until early February.

This isn't a review, since I haven't seen the show. But it amazes me that an exhibition like this exists, so consider this another 'live stream' post—a placeholder for reflections and mullings on and around Leonardo's unbelievable images, with some suggestions about why we are seeing more of this work; and subject to being updated with new links, reviews and so on.

To state the obvious, it isn't easy to put together an exhibition like this. In fact there has never been, and will never be, a 'complete' Leonardo retrospective in the manner of a Picasso, a Judd, or a Richter survey—those big, bulky exhibitions that cover the full range of a capacious individual's oeuvre, and of which one can say, with a certain admiration, "I am large, I contain multitudes." These kinds of shows are necessarily overwhelming because they cover a multifaceted life. But in this case the reasons are practical: some of these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century frescoes are site-specific (painted directly on a wall), and they are universally under bureaucratic lock and key: all Leonardo's work, from the most magnificent painting to the quickest, most fleeting of drawings are owed by institutions and individuals (and the Royal Family). So the problems of red tape for any curator contemplating this kind of mountainous show is unimaginable.

Studies of Water passing Obstacles and falling, c. 1508-9

Three Impossible Images

1.

Marianne Moore, A Jellyfish (1959)

Of course this first one isn’t even an image, but a poem—a lyric. In this digital audio file at the SFMA Poetry Center you can hear Marianne Moore reading it. Listening to this clip is lovely, because it gives you a sense of the witty, self-depreciating charm of the personality behind the language.

If this poem is an ‘image,’ it is a drama of the almost-visible, starring a jellyfish. Quite a specific, individual jellyfish, swimming around as they do, and momentarily caught in a small poetic narrative. It is the jellyfish that is both visible and invisible: fluctuating, transparent, ethereal, sometimes translucent and sometimes highly colored, jewel-toned, gem-like, strangely compelling, very beautiful, intensely desirable, and alive.

The first lines of the poem contain so much all-over movement that you sense the liquidity before articulating it. Yet when the “arm/ approaches” everything changes. Suddenly it hits you that there’s no glass barrier, an aquarium or a zoo, to separate the person from the jellyfish, so that that this might actually be an eco-drama: a story of ecological ethics in which the arm is in the ocean with the jellyfish.

And this realization introduces two important other movements. When the arm drops back it registers fear, but also something else. “Abandon[ing] your intent” isn't exactly giving up. There’s a hint of purposeful letting go: a deliberate act of relinquishment, or an instinctive reaction to the liveness of the jellyfish’s quiver.

This poem is a kind of motionless animation. It is a drama in which what is not visible becomes more practically significant than we can see, so that a very attractive ‘thing’ is not removed from its environment.

Cheating at jigsaw puzzles

Recent guest poster and blog follower, Matt informed me of the following interesting example of science helping art. Or more precisely, helping recover art.

"In 1944, a bombing raid almost completely destroyed an enormous Padua church fresco that dated back to the Renaissance and had once been admired by Goethe. Some 88,000 tiny pieces of plaster were rescued from the rubble, and a mathematician has managed to piece some of the masterpiece back together."

Link to the original article.

I recommend going to the original article to properly understand what this clever mathematician has done. If I try to summarise I expect that my chances of accurate description are relatively small, given that I will be summarising a news story that is already a summary of the actual algorithm used by the mathematician.

It's a rare example of the overlapping of art, history and mathematics. The application won't have a profound impact on any of the disciplines, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Of course if the art historians had just given me all the pieces 13 or so years ago I'm sure I could have put them all together on one of the many afternoons I spent in the summer holidays watching cricket and piecing together progressively more complicated jigsaw puzzles. But, I'm sure they had their reasons to wait.

[With apologies to Shaun for editing this post, here are a couple of mathematical explanations of this research, beginning with a summary. -MM]

Massimo Fornasier, "Mathematics enters the picture." Mathematics and Statistics, 2009, Volume 3, 217-228.

Massimo Fornasier, "Faithful Recovery of Vector Valued Functions from Incomplete Data: Recolorization and Art Restoration," Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007, Volume 4485/2007, 116-127.

Massimo Fornasier, Domenico Toniolo, "Fast, robust and efficient 2D pattern recognition for re-assembling fragmented images." Pattern Recognition, Volume 38, Issue 11, November 2005, 2074-2087.

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Historical Transparency-washing?

[Note from Shaun: the following is a guest post from Matthew Metcalfe. Just like our previous guest poster, Matt and I went to school together. While, at heart, Matt is as kiwi as a 50 cent lolly mixture, he currently lives in Munich. He is also a trained historian. The following is Matt's searching account of an attempt by one of the richest families in Germany, the Quandt dynasty, to transparently(?) reveal their family history.]

"The Rise of the Quandts"

Since I agree with the premise of this blog – the desire to combine the arts and science – I wanted to open up a short chapter on a development out of the circles of German historiography (in German such courses of study belong to the “breadless arts”).

Where most people see politics as current affairs, when you are an historian, you tend to see history everywhere; behind trade deals, bilateral agreements, political and religious conflicts in northern Africa or the Middle East.

If I had to explain how I see the world, for me the world events seem to happen like untidy piles of photos. At any one point you can see the top photos, showing a snapshot of history. But they always overlap, are different sizes and of varying quality and sharpness.

As you pick off the top photos (for most people the current affairs on the news) you see that the motifs are similar but the faces are different. The overlaps and the connections move back and forth as you go through layer on layer.

Three-and-a-half years ago there was an industrial family dynasty where the stack of photos seemed rather short and orderly. The Quandts were a quiet bunch, not talking about their family in detail, typical for tight-knit powerful families. This was all the more interesting because of the sharpness of some of the photos (both real and metaphorical).

For those unfamiliar with the name, the Quandt family, among the richest in Germany, has been the controlling shareholder of BMW since the 1950s. Even though the shareprice is down and analysts are currently saying to buy while it is underpriced, the total fortune of the various family members is estimated at a total of upwards of US30bn, thanks to the wealth of companies they control.

As is the case with many industrial dynasties in Germany, it was safely assumed that the Quandts had profited disproportionately from the policies and crimes perpetrated during the period of National Socialism.

In spite of this, due to the facts that

1. the members of the family directly involved had died before the major wave of investigations into companies were initiated after intense pressure by victim organisations (e.g. companies like Allianz, Deutsche Bank) 
2. the successors to the family fortune had never really wanted to delve into the darker corners of their father’s closet and jealously guarded the archival material,

the exact details of the involvement had never surfaced.

Until, however, a documentary called “The Silence of the Quandts” in 2007, produced and broadcasted by the German broadcaster ARD let off a bombshell and accused the family of intentionally silencing their history and the growth of their fortune, social and political influence on the backs of concentration camp slave labour during WWII.

Elegy in the Turbine Hall

I was sad to realize while in London in September that I was narrowly missing two shows at Tate Modern: an impressive looking Gerhard Richter survey, and Tacita Dean's commission for the Turbine Hall. Dean's work opened last night to a chorus of reviews, with lots more undoubtedly to come. I'll keep an ongoing roster of interesting commentary at the end of this post.

The piece is called FILM. It's a striking installation of poetic cinema: a jewel-toned, silent, 11 minute film presented as a monumental projection onto a 13 meter screen nestled toward the back of the Turbine Hall. The projection system uses 35mm film and a cinemascope lens turned around at 90 degrees to achieve the very unusual vertical format. And it contains no digital post-production － all the visualizations, superimpositions, and image combinations are made with "analog" methods: during production, inside a 16mm camera, and with splices on a Steenbeck editing machine.

That would be because the piece is a strong polemic for the material of film, and a claim for the differences between celluloid and digital. Tacita Dean talks about celluloid film as her medium here and here, likening it to oil paint. She wrote an impassioned manifesto for it earlier this year, and in the exhibition's accompanying catalog surveys 80 cinematic artists about this question of filmic obsolescence. "Pitched against this," she writes － 'this' being the film industry's absolute turn to the digital in recent years － "art is voiceless and insignificant." You don't have to be sympathetic to this point of view to still hear in it a Shakespearean question －"How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?" In a sensitive documentary, produced by the Tate to contextualize the show, Dean describes the intensity of her commitment to this medium around a question of intimacy:

Film and digital are just different mediums. They're very intrinsically different: they're made differently, they're seen differently. Film is my medium, just as oil is the medium of painters. I need the time of film for my work, and the atmosphere of film.

Anticipating the end of celluloid is like waiting for a tsunami to arrive. A lot will change when the wave finally hits, and there have been plenty of indicators of its encroaching already － practically for a generation. But we're probably near the crucial moment now, which adds a certain pathos to this work. The last lab in Britain that would process 16mm film closed during the production of Dean's FILM, and inexperience in the Dutch lab that was able to process it resulted in some major errors.

The material medium of celluloid film has remained essentially unchanged since cinema was invented in the nineteenth century. I think this is partly why its passing away is experienced so emotionally, as an enormous loss, by cinephilic aficionados. But the analog/digital debate can easily devolve into a retrograde fight, which is why I think it matters that Dean claims that her stance isn't absolutist but aimed at demanding ongoing choice between the two:

that analogue film might be allowed to remain an option for those who want it, and for the ascendency of one not to have to mean the extinguishing of the other.

I'd be curious to hear from people who are able to actually see the piece since my sense of it is, of course, digitally mediated.

Reviews, Tacita Dean, FILM, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, 11 October 2011–11 March 2012
(in chronological order, more or less):

e-flux, press release
Background interview at Phaidon Press
In the artist's voice, the making of: a lovely process documentary from the Tate

Sylvie Lin, The Disappearance of Film－An Interview with Philippe-Alain Michaud (Art Taipei Forum)

Adrian Searle, The Guardian
Emily Eakin, New Yorker
Sarah Kent, The Arts Desk
Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman
GertiesGirl, Inscape (blog) 
Jackie Wullschlager, The Financial Times
Charles Darwent, The Independent
Alison Roberts, This Is London
Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Royal Academy of Arts Magazine
Cate Smierciak, Berlin Art Link
Sally O'Reilly, Art Review

And the last word, perhaps, to the curator Nicholas Cullinan:

In reading about Dean’s filmic works, which document edifices either derelict (Bubble House and Palast) or belonging to another era (Boots and Fernsehturm), or sitters captured towards the end of their life, a word that is all too often used to describe them is ‘nostalgia’. This characterisation of Dean’s films gives me pause. It strikes me as wrong, or at least reductive and misleading. Dean’s works have thus far tended to be written about in terms of ruins, remnants and obsolescence, and while those words may be applied to some of the subjects captured by her camera, the images within her films, and in FILM particularly, are not fragmented or entropic, but instead alive and vital. They are images which very much seem to be making a case for why they should, why they must, be preserved in order to go on existing. And this difference between my account of Dean’s work and those of others hinges upon a simple perception.

Where some see fossilisation in the subjects captured by her camera’s lens, I see revivification, every time the projector is switched on and these images are summoned back to life once more. If film is a medium that seemingly lacks a physical presence or substance, and is instead one which flickers and fades phantasmagorically before us and then persists largely in the memory, then this immateriality is echoed in Dean’s films, capturing that which is fugitive or fleeting – light changing, places or people before they vanish, time passing. Those who see only nostalgia in her films miss the point, because what I see in Dean’s work, and in FILM in particular, is wonderment at what can be salvaged by the camera’s lens. 

Image credits: Ian Nicholson / PA; Sarah Lee for The Guardian; Ray Tang/Rex Features, all from The Guardian; video from the Visit London Blog

Moving images, everywhere

A few years ago the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris opened a large public exhibition titled Le Mouvement des images (The Movement of Images) -- information and images here. The Centre Pompidou is France’s National Museum of Modern Art, covering both the 20th and 21st centuries, and it boasts one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of film and moving image art.

Le Mouvement des images was based on a straightforward but quite radical premise: that the art of the 20th century should be re-read through the cinema experience. What this implied was a reconsideration of assumptions about the relation of art and technology to include not just film and photography, but also the traditionally plastic arts: painting, sculpture, drawing. In short, the exhibition was “a redefinition of the cinematographic experience widened to include all the visual arts.”

The strength of the Pompidu’s collection meant that the exhibition’s curator Philippe-Alain Michaud had an opportunity rarely available to curators and academics - he was able to work directly from the museum’s holdings to literally re-organize the canon of modern art relative to the idea that the filmic and ‘static’ arts both reflect a technological influence. For example, in relation to series of drawings made by Picasso several minutes apart in 1970, the artist is quoted as observing “It’s the movement of the painting that interests me, the dramatic effort from one vision to the next.” Taking a dynamic principal like movement as subject tends to alter the painting’s emphasis from fixity to flux.

I mention Le Mouvement des images because it seems a good example of a perspective from within the arts relevant to the interdisciplinary interests of this blog. In part, this is because Michaud understands film to be something far more pervasive than Hollywood blockbusters: he defines ‘cinema’ in a way that includes the moving images that are a ubiquitous part of our daily life, including those on the internet, on iPhones, webcams, and in scientific laboratories.

Part of my interest in the specific art/science crossover comes out of the observation that moving images are an increasingly integral, even methodological component of contemporary scientific research. Some of my current reading on the topic goes so far as to suggest that filmic tools like live-cell imaging are changing biology by introducing a dynamic imaging process into the heart of the scientific method. In that vein, it is probably not a coincidence that a couple of Shaun and James’ recent posts have involved links to films - of animation by stop-motion, by cell structures, and by particles.

So if it seems viable to revise the history of Modern art from the point of view of dynamic images, can we extend that perspective to science? I’m curious about the perspective on film as a research tool from the other side of the art/science equation.

Image credit: Gerhard Richter, Halfmannshof (1968), Offset print on lightweight cardboard. Based on a photograph taken by the artist from a moving train.

Collaboration

I'm currently in New York engaging in a kind of anthropological data collection - looking through museum archives, conducting interviews, etc. One of the targets of my stalking is Anthony McCall, an important artist, and whose medium is light. Among his current projects is a large public commission from the U.K. which will coincide with the 2012 Olympics. It’s called Column, and the materials are ‘air and water.’ McCall says the work came essentially out of sharing a bottle of wine with an old friend, a physicist and inventor named John McNulty.

Some links to press descriptions of Column, which will draw a dynamic line of mist into the vertical horizon and disappear into the sky:

The Guardian
The Telegraph
Creative Review - including a video clip of the piece in scale model

And a couple of recent interviews:

Museo Magazine - on the technical backdrop to Column, other large public projects in New Zealand and New York, and on the social texture of public art
Bomb Magazine