This summer, physicist Larry Lee had festival-goers dancing to the sounds of science. He uses his musical training and an interest in collider machinery to create a new instrument of sorts. Using a piece of standard lab equipment, Lee has created a science-inspired, electronic music-backed light show.
Artist Shanthi Chandrasekar explains the mixture of art and physics in her new gallery exhibit at Fermilab.
Photographer Adam Nadel started his residency at Fermilab taking the portraits he is known for, but then he found himself venturing onto new artistic ground.
From SDPB Radio’s “In the Moment: Innovation,” July 26, 2019: In this 7-minute radio piece, Fermilab 2018 artist-in-residence Adam Nadel talks about a musical composition he wrote based on neutrino experiment data. When neutrinos interact with other particles inside an argon detector, those interactions are recorded by thousands of thin wires. Nadel transcribed the wire over time onto a musical score.
In the world of particle physics, scientists work with tiny, invisible particles, tracking their collisions and interactions with one another. But what if you could render them as music? What would these songs of the subatomic sound like? Adam Nadel, Fermilab’s 2018 artist-in-residence, worked with scientists at Fermilab and set out to do just that. Read on to hear his music.
A Swedish university tapped the founding director of CERN’s artist-in-residence program to curate a new art exhibit inspired by physics. The pieces are not literal translations of physics concepts to other media or illustrations of physics principles or phenomena. Physics was a spark for the artists, sometimes very clearly and sometimes more tangentially.
Facio uses woven textiles to recreate the structure of the cosmos from astrophysical data. A textiles conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago, he sees parallels between an artist’s and a scientist’s work. Facio will be the fifth artist in the residency program, which Fermilab started in 2014.
From Cinema Blend, Jan. 17, 2019: As the episode opens, Amy and Sheldon are filming Fun with Flags, and when Amy goes to check comments on her phone she sees that they’ve gotten a comment from Fermilab, the particle physics and accelerator laboratory in Chicago, letting them know that a team of scientists has confirmed their theory with an experiment.
CERN inspired famous Dutch fashion artist Iris van Herpen to create her Magnetic Motion collection.
From Voyage Chicago, Dec. 6, 2018: Georgia Schwender, Fermilab Art Gallery curator, talks about creating art, curating a gallery, and founding the lab’s artist-in-residence program.