Another exercise  for thesis:

The following is a “dream review” written as a visualization exercise for thesis class at ITP.  The facts and links are all true, the work is in progress, but the exhibition and its review are works of imagination and visualization.

If anyone is interested in making the exhibition a reality, let me know!

LACMA was illuminated with recent works by Peter Terezakis bringing discovery of some of the unseen forces which shape our world.

Mr. Terezakis has a long history of creating works of art which directs viewers toward issues affecting our biosphere.  From early work with threatened sea turtle habitat in Cozumel, the large-scale light installations of Heart Beats Light, and the site-specific performance-installations of Sacred Sky Sacred Earth, Terezakis’s trajectory has been that of increasing audience participation by shrinking the boundaries between the  implied largesse of consumerism and the impact of that thinking on the natural world.

Terezakis maintains that a tide of radioactive waste is inexorably drifting toward the western shore of the North American continent.  The government of Japan has responded to world-wide concern by criminalizing media coverage of clean-up efforts at the crippled nuclear reactors of Fukushima.  In keeping with its own actions criminalizing the 2010 media coverage of BP’s Gulf oil spill ($40,000 fines), the Obama administration has voiced support of Japan’s new laws and by extending the scope of existing anti-terrorism and secrecy acts¹.

In response to a climate of denial and obfuscation, the artist has created a series of sculptures simply titled “Sentinel” which detect nuclear power’s detritus on both monumental and personal scale.

My first view of the Sentinel sculptures was the museum’s courtyard installation.  The  grid of nine dark, slender vertical elements of glass and bronze brought to mind a somber, ordered Cycladic Burghers of Calais.

Designed to flash bright white pulses of light in response to detected occurrences of ionizing radiation, these minimalist instrument-objects evoke a morbid fascination: we know that we never want to see them illuminate.  We can imagine their action, but do not want to see them turn on as we will be helpless to do anything about their message.  Ironically the sculpture is completed in the mind’s eye living on in the viewer’s memory long after leaving the exhibition.

Leaving the Sentinels to mutely stand guard, the exhibition continued through entering  the west gallery.  In an otherwise dark expanse, against the far wall were a series of colored volumes, Terezakis’s signature “Healing Light” project.  This work represents nearly forty years of research with lifelong friend and collaborator Dr. Joseph Shapiro, O.D. 
Centered in each luminous volume was a reconstructed nineteenth-twentieth century experimental apparatus.  These instruments were fundamental to the discovery of naturally occurring and man-made radiation by key scientists from 1895 – 1905.

The exhibition’s  Acoustiguide provided descriptive context for these early hand-made tools as well as insight into the artist’s excitement at what was a golden age of discovery: “….this was when the energy and glue of  subatomic forces began to be understood and a new age for mankind began.”

Within the near-mystical atmosphere of the Violet room were white bean bag chairs (reminiscent of 60’s optimism).  On each chair was a virtual reality (VR) headset whose program was  eponymously titled, “See.”

Soon after putting my headset on I began to view green flashes of light while hearing something like white noise.   Minutes went by in moments as I tried to determine the scale of what I was experiencing.  Afterwards I found out that what I was hearing and seeing was not an animation of an imagined celestial activity.  

What I had been viewing were photons emitted in response to being struck by alpha particles from a tiny amount of decomposing radionuclides: in real-time!

The work’s title is a reference  to the description that Sir William Crookes gave when he first viewed radioactive decay through a microscope, “…the surface looks like a turbulent, luminous sea.”  Through participation in this installation, I experienced the wonder of his discovery first hand.

In the museum’s gift shop are miniature, wearable versions of the Sentinel sculptures which are equipped with the same radiation detection sensor and electronics as their larger counterparts.  These elegant works have been  designed and engineered by the artist with direction and support from mentor Eric Rosenthal, resident scientist at New York University’s renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

In the 1970s Mr. Terezakis invented a wearable LED pin and eventually created a line of jewelry which was featured in Mademoiselle, Interview, ID Design, and sold world-wide.
Like his original Mykro Dot jewelry, today’s wearable miniature Sentinel sculptures are also “at home on a jacket or blouse.”  What is different is that they monitor the air which we breathe, the rooms we enter, water we drink, and our food when shopping or dining.  

Like their much larger counterparts, I hope that they will always remain dark.

Terezakis continues to honor his artistic heritage and late mentor Billy Kluver, by promulgating an ethic of collaboration and process between artists, scientists, and engineers.  In this way communication and understanding between disciplines of knowledge become a method of self-discovery.  In many respects this exhibition is an artist’s work run full circle. It chronicles a  journey from a need to know, to discovery, exploration, and back to a need to share the results of this curiosity within a greater community.  Sharing the concerns of Russian Constructivists, Terezakis’s concerns are for a society on the edge of an uncertain tomorrow.

The exhibition will remain on display until midnight December 31st.

For more of this artist’s work, visit http://www.terezakis.com

It is my intention to build an instrument which will track the physical activity of sub-atomic particles and use that information to create a sculptural environment of light and sound using the data in real-time.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to update the Geiger – Mueller tube method of detecting alpha particles and ionizing radiation using contemporary materials and technology.  This new sensor will be incorporated into a large scale sculpture as well as wearable electronic jewelry.

In order to accomplish these goals I am rebuilding several experimental pieces of apparatus used to discover the presence of radiation during the late 1800s – early 1900s.

These are the objects referenced in the “dream review” exercise for thesis class.

There are a number of aspects of this project which I find compelling.  The first is that many key discoveries regarding the basic physics of why and how the subatomic world
works were produced within a relatively short period of time and that relatively primitive tools were used to do so.

I believe that presenting a re-examination of these early materials, techniques, and theories will create creative opportunities for like-minded individuals to explore room temperature sub-atomic interactions (or room temperature nuclear reactions) including the possibility of the generation of electricity by methods other than solar cells and thermocouples⁷.

Literature surrounding table-top nuclear pheomenae fusion suggests that investigation into the phenomenon first began with Dr. Tandberg (Sweden, 1927) whose electrochemical cell construction was used by Fleischmann and Pons sixty-two years later.

In 1887 Heinrich Hertz observed that sparks were emitted from a piece of metal struck by ultraviolet light. In 1927 Albert Einstein came up with an explanation of what became known as the photoelectric effect. A hundred and twenty-seven years after Hertz’s discovery, Bell Laboratories built  the direct ancestors of today’s solar cells to power spacecraft.

The facts are that low energy nuclear reactions have been investigated on and off for nearly one hundred years and that we utilize many of them today.  It is time that…. it is past time that this technology is brought to serve humanity before we destroy all that we hold beautiful.

A separate issue is that contemporary society has been saddled with increasingly restrictive government oversight/censorship of scientific observation.    Management of the LANDSAT imaging satellite was recently turned over to the Department of the Interior.⁸  The transfer of control of satellite data which has been so instrumental in gathering climate change data from NASA to an agency with other agendas, is chilling.   There are other examples in Canada and the United States of a similar scale, including the harassment of scientists.

During the BP oil spill, President Obama’s administration made media coverage of the event illegal – and punishable by a $40,000 fine.  Recent events in Japan have conspired to create a new secrecy law restricting media from covering industrial disasters: specifically  Fukushima’s reactors.  It is interesting to me that President Obama has not only supported this new law, but has also expanded existing anti-terrorism legislation to extend to fracking operations, water treatment plants, and other targets affecting “national security.”

Given this atmosphere of mistrust, I believe the average citizen should have access to accurate, affordable radiation detection instrumentation and that the data should be easily viewable on line.  It is my intention to create a wearable and to open source the technology for others to be able to create their own devices.  Through the advisement and support of ITP’s resident scientist, Eric Rosenthal I will be able to do just that.