People become light in this collective experiment to plot the (surprisingly irregular) gravitational field of Sanctuary.
Field Lines is an interactive artwork made by the motion of the participants as they are guided and influenced by both visible and dark matter. Over the course of Sanctuary, everyone taking part will create their own track that marks a single ‘observation’. Whilst individually indecipherable, together these tracks will create an assembly of observations that will map out the distorted spacetime of Sanctuary and provide the clues to the nature of the dark matter and how they might think through and explore these in sound and body.
A partnership between artist Rachel Rosen and Professor Andy Newsam of the Astrophysics Research Institute, Liverpool John Moores University, who will also be on hand to discuss the mysteries of the universe, Field Lines is an immersive investigation into dark matter and it’s effect on spacetime.
Field lines runs 2pm-7pm with a short talk and discussion with Prof. Newsam at 3pm, 5pm and 7pm. Saturday only.
Andrew Newsam is Professor of Astronomy Education and Engagement at Liverpool John Moores University. After studying cosmology at Glasgow University, and working as an observational astronomer at the University of Southampton, he joined LJMU in 1998 to help set up the educational arm of the Liverpool Telescope, which later became the National Schools’ Observatory, one of the largest astronomy education projects in the world. As well as astronomical research and education he is a keen science communicator, giving talks to many thousands of schoolchildren, amateur astronomers and the general public throughout the UK and beyond, as well as working with artists of all kinds on new ways – from show gardens to street theatre – to bring the delights of astronomy to as many people as possible.
Rachel Rosen is an interdisciplinary artist working across mediums of sculpture/ installation and theatre design/performance, often in outdoor settings in her adopted home of Wales. Her work explores concepts of space, time and human senses. Her materials are frequently found and partially reworked, exhibiting the passage of time and the elements; her concerns are to question our relationship to what is around us and how we experience it. In recent years she has experimented with sound and light interventions, and has undertaken a number of art-science collaborations.
Page image credit NASA, ESA, J. Richard (CRAL) and J.-P. Kneib (LAM) – see https://esahubble.org/copyright
sanctuarylab.org 