University Place

Good evening and welcome to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab. I'm Dave Nelson standing in for Tom Zinnen tonight. And Wednesday Nite @ The Lab meets, as you know, every week, fifty weeks of the year, sponsored by the Biotech Center, UW Science Alliance, UW-Extension, Cooperative Extension, Wisconsin Public TV, of course, the Alumni Association, and, for tonight, the Madison Science Museum. It's a real pleasure for me to introduce tonight Floor van de Velde who is spending some days in Madison assembling an exhibit that is the first exhibit in the new Madison Science Museum which will open up in the fall near the Square. Floor's an artist, and the exhibit she's brought to the Science Museum represents a fusion of science and art.

This is the title of her talk

Luminous Scores, Reflections on Light and Art in Science. It's a combination of artworks, interactive installations, pictures, photographs made in the ultraviolent and infrared, a series of uses of light that challenge your way of thinking about light. And I think you'll find it fascinating. We hope you'll come to the opening of the new Science Museum late in October of this year. Floor's artistic work is actually very fundamentally connected to the University of Wisconsin. It turns out that at the turn of the 19th century, last century, 20th century, there was a professor here, Robert Wood, who became known widely as the father of ultraviolet and infrared photography. He was in the vanguard of people who recognized that you could actually photograph things using light

that you couldn't see

infrared and ultraviolet. He developed a filter that would filter the visible light out and allow IR and UV to go through. And that filter, called a Wood filter after him, it turns out to be what makes black light work. Those things are masks that none of the visible come through. He also did some interesting work with sound, and he managed somehow to photograph ultrasound waves. And we'll here a little about all of this from Floor. Floor is a South African who has also lived in Belgium. She lives in Boston now. Her artistic work involves light in all kinds of ways, as you'll see. She has a graduate degree from MIT in an area called Art, Culture and Technology. That's not your standard Chemistry major. And, she now teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She's also associated with an art collective in San Francisco, the Night House Studio. Her talk tonight is Reflections on Light in Art and Science. Please join me in welcoming Floor van de Velde. (applause) Thanks, Dave, that's a very generous introduction. Thank you for coming. Yeah, the title of my talk is Luminous Scores, also the title of the exhibition, Reflections on Light in Art and Science. As I go through the talk, you might start to understand a bit more what the word "scores" means in general, relating to this exhibition, but also what it means to me in terms of how I approach my practice and how I approach these works in terms of the collaboration with the museum. I really want to thank the Madison Science Museum for inviting me to envision and together collaborate, and put on a really awesome exhibition that's literally in the works right now. It also happens to be the International Year of Light, as designated by the UN General Assembly. And, it's the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies to raise global awareness about how light-based technologies can provide solutions to challenges such as energy, education, agriculture and health. Of course as an artist, this means something different to me. I think about these things as well,

but it begs the question

what exactly is light? I think it depends who you ask. And, I think, light means many different things to many different people. And, I think, especially this week has made me realize that there are a lot of different answers. And, especially in talking to some of the scientists here, how they think about light is vastly different from how I view light. In architecture, use of natural light is not just functional, but also symbolic. Here we see the interior of the Pantheon Dome where the oculus symbolizes the arched vault of the heaven or the heavens. This specific oculus or this architecture has influenced contemporary light art as well, as you'll see a little bit later when I'll introduce artists like James Turrell and Robert Irwin. Stained glass as an art form reached its height in the Middle Ages. Of course, there's also something we're very familiar with. And, light as a medium in the arts, of course, has a very, very long history. I can't possibly explain all of it in one slide, but going back to the Renaissance with Chiaroscuro where light is used to achieve a sense of volume and depth perception, or Man Ray's light painting. Here a portrait of Picasso. And then later on, of course, also contemporary minimalists' use of light with sculptures like Dan Flavin and some of the other artists that I will introduce. Today, very much there's a dialogue also between architecture and light and artists that work with light. You're starting to see many artists that are using light to actually create space, and to bend space, and to work with space, and create a whole different feeling of space. This is Carlos Cruz-Diez from Argentina, and he creates these rooms that are just filled with different colors of light, that bathe you in light, and you just really get the sensation that each space feels entirely different. Interesting things start happening when artists start collaborating with scientists or start really thinking about the physics of light. Here you see a piece by Olafur Eliasson. It's called "Your Uncertain Shadow". I don't know how many of you are familiar with Olafur's work, but all his pieces are prefaced with "your", meaning that each piece is your experience. He puts the viewer in the center of the experience. I also think about art this way. Here we have halogen lights that have different color bulbs, and when you move in front of them in the white projection screen, you see colored shadows. This gives the viewer sort of a different sense of light, also introduces them to aspects of light. For example here, additive light. They get a sense of what that actually looks like and what that means. As an artist, I understand light very much connected to color. But as it turns out, of course, the visible spectrum is a very, very tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum. And in fact, when we start looking around, when we start going past the visible spectrum, we have ultraviolet, infrared and - I won't even talk about X-rays, or microwaves, or radio waves. At some point, I'm sure, as an artist I'll be able to investigate those and include those in my work. But for the time being, I'm focused, especially in this exhibition, on ultraviolet and infrared. So, this exhibition has really allowed me to broaden my understanding of light, which brings me to this very colorful character that Dave introduced earlier, Robert Wood, and for me, has been a very large inspiration for this exhibition. Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts. He was a physicist and an inventor. And I formed links between his scientific discoveries and the art that is going to appear in the exhibition. He's the first to make photographs showing infrared and ultraviolet radiation. He's also the first person to photograph UV fluorescence. And these so-called "black lights" that we talk about now, emitting UV are also referred to as "Wood's light" these days. He also coined the term "Fish Islands" in his book "Physical Optics" which was written in 1911, I believe. And, he coined it "Fish Islands" because of how a fish would see light from underneath the lake. He created a whole camera filled with water so he could actually see the word around him in 180 degrees. Besides these, he's had many other discoveries and inventions. He really was an incredible person. I read a biography about him written in 1938, very interesting. For example, he also wrote a best-selling book of poetry, and I actually brought a copy with me that Dave will pass around for you to look at. It's a first edition, so please handle carefully. It's going to be included in exhibition, but I thought it'd be nice for you to see this book. It's called "How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers "and Other Wood-cuts". It's a beginner's guide to flornithology. And it just sort of shows Robert Woods' curious spirit and his sense of humor which I'm really very fascinated by, because, as an artist, that's how I approach life as well. And it's just so nice to see that a scientist also has that approach to life. For most people, when you say UV-light or black light, this is sort of the image that they have. It's associated with night life or Halloween parties. But strictly speaking, black light is a kind of UV-light. It's light that emits ultraviolet radiation. So, the sun is a source of the full spectrum of UV that reaches the earth and it can penetrate our skin. And I'm sure you've seen on sunscreen bottles, you'll have UVA, UVB, and you'll also have UVC. UVA accounts for 95% of UV radiation that reaches the earth, and this penetrates the second layer of skin. UVB are also harmful rays that cause sunburn, and an increased exposure can risk DNA and other cellular damage in living organisms. I'm not sure what UV-Vacuum is (laughs), yet to be discovered. I was very inspired by UV light earlier on in 2012 and 2013 and made several works using fluorescent light, I mean UV fluorescent light. I'll show you the next slide which will you give you more of an idea of what this really looks like. They're large sheets of fluorescent acrylic, etched on CNC routers. They're about 4 by 7 feet, hanging from the ceiling underneath a matrix of black light. This is the view from the bottom. I'm not sure why I have two titles here but (chuckles), so make it extra-clear. But this, this piece is called "Box for Luminous Squares", actually was the smallest piece in the show, and the one that really got me thinking the most. So, these are off-cuts from the other pieces that I made from fluorescent acrylic, and I put them in an antique Kodak slide box. And I had a pair of gloves for people to handle these squares with and to be able to look through the room and observe the rest of the pieces through these slides. And at the end of the exhibition, everyone could take a slide home with him. But it sort of begged this idea of how do you re-activate the act of looking, merely looking at something. You invite someone to explore a space, to look at your exhibition, but how do you really engage them? How do you give them autonomy to look at their surroundings in their own way? An exhibition that was really inspiring to me is called "The Responsive Eye". This was a show of optical art, or more commonly known as "op-art", in 1965, presented at the MoMA,

which caused quite an uproar

people weren't used to this kind of art. Typical op-art is, of course, in black and white. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with op-art.

And op-art gives an impression of movement

hidden images, flashing and vibrating patterns, swelling or warping. And I'm including a few examples here

of the more familiar op-artists

Bridget Riley. Victor Vasarely. Jean-Pierre Yvaral, who was actually the son of Vasarely. Julio Le Parc. And what's especially fascinating to me about these works, I mean, I think, if I can just go back a couple of slides, we look at this and we think, "That's a little cheesy"; "I don't really like that." But if you think this was created before the advent of computers and graphics, this was incredible to be able to paint this freehand, so were these works. So, I think as someone who half-way through grew up with computers, I'm very fascinated by how you actually create this using just paint and canvas. When I was reading through the press release for the Responsive Eye, there was a part of the press release that caught my eye, pun intended. It says here, "This new art, called by various names "Optical", "Retinal", "Cool", "The New Abstraction", "establishes a new relationship "between the observer and a work of art." And I'll come back to this in a little bit. "Although the works themselves are entirely static, "they appear to move because of the use "of various optical devices." And this really started, it helped me sort of think about this idea of how do we use our eyes. I think in an age where we all are used to screens, I think we have all become very lazy looking at, at art, and not taking the time. I mean, sometimes I go to a museum and I see people run in, take an image, and run out, and I'm thinking, "What has that person experienced "of that art?" Absolutely nothing. But it's the desire to want to move through as many pieces of art as you possibly can. So what are the potentialities of a visual art capable of effecting perception so physically and directly? Can an advance understanding and application of functional images open a new path from retinal exhortation to emotions and ideas? Interesting question. I'm not sure if the effect is fully visible here; on my screen it's just really popping out. So, this is one of the pieces that will be mounted at the Madison Science Museum, still working on it, but this is an earlier rendition. It's called "Transit Sublime", and I'm calling it "transit" because, really when you look at it in real life, this image probably, I don't know if you really get the effect, but when you're looking at this print, it really does start to move. And with the added lights and the fluorescent plexi and the blacklight, it really starts vibrating. And the longer you look at it, the more it starts to move. Something else I'm investigating in this exhibition is infrared photography. I wanted to include some of Robert Woods' original infrared photographs, but you can't really see much of what's going on. They look like black and white images. Of course, the quality is not that great. So, I'm including a more contemporary example of infrared photography where you can see the other-worldly result from using an infrared filter. Our eyes cannot see IR light. It's beyond what's classified as "visible spectrum", as we saw earlier. You can take photographs using infrared filters. You can also have your camera adapted to only take infrared photography. While I was looking at infrared photography, I also found this example on NASA's site. In fact, NASA has quite a few images of earth, of volcano, volcanic eruptions in infrared. So, what you see here is a section of earth north of Fresno in California. So, right now California, 82% of California is in a state of extreme drought. 58% is an exceptional drought, and it's only getting worse. So, on the left you can see in 2011 everything that's red shows you what is vegetation. On the right, only three years later, you can really see the impact of the drought. Everything that's brown is where we've lost vegetation. Interestingly, you can see where agriculture is taking place, how those areas still remain red in the infrared spectrum. If you look carefully, too, you'll see that the lakes have shrunk as well. It's a little hard to tell here. But I think images like this really are helpful for us to understand what's happening, especially looking at our planet from such a distance. It would be really hard to tell what that actual impact is. My response to these images-- So these images are at the Madison Science Museum as well. I'm just going to show you a few. But I decided to use Google Earth and sort of have my own tour around the planet, planet Earth, and see what I see. Here's Al Karak in Jordan. Image on the left is just the image as I took it from Google Earth, and I'm faking infrared a little bit here by swapping the red and the blue channels in Photoshop, but you basically get the same effect. And what I find really interesting here is it creates almost an abstract painting, it becomes other-worldly. Another example of Lake Junin in Peru. Image on the left, how it's seen normally; on the right, infrared. I'd like to back to this image of Robert Wood, because of all the images, all the images that I research for this exhibition, I think, this is the one I kept coming back to, the one that really fascinated me,

everything about it

the way he's dressed; how he's rather serious, but at the same time you can kind of see he's not that serious. And after having read about his life and understanding more about his character, I think this image really spoke to me. This image is included in exhibition, and it's amazing how one image can inspire an entire, you know, way of thinking and collection of works. And that's exactly what happened to me with this image. So, in the field of optics, Robert Wood was very active, and he invented and improved upon diffraction grating, and he was very active in spectroscopy as well. I didn't know what diffraction grating was when I read about this. So, I had to, of course, look up pictures, because that's how I think, in pictures. In fact, I think most people think in pictures. But, diffraction grating sounds really complicated, but when you really think, when you divide the word up "diffraction" and "grating", it really starts making sense. It's a plate of glass or metal ruled with very close parallel lines. And you can produce a spectrum by diffraction and interference of light with these plates. So, in order to separate light of different wave lengths with high resolution, diffraction grating is used. I just love this image. To me, of course, as an artist, it's just beautiful. But this is taken with a spectrograph. It allows you to look at wave-lengths of light, either absorbed or admitted from chemical species. And a spectrograph will tell you the wave-length of each type of light that is emitted. And I guess, to me it's just amazing how something like light can give you information about something else. So, this information I took and came up with this sculpture that's also going to be at the Madison Science Museum. For now, I'm calling it the "Diffraction Sculpture". I'm sure I'll think of a more romantic title. This is a not-so-good image. I promise I will get better images. But this was my response to diffraction grating. It's an interactive sculpture. It's basically a table about 30 inches high that you can interact with. You can play with the shape and turn it around and really see the effect of the diffraction grating. You could use your own cell phone with a light or you could use other single point light sources that I will provide in the room. This essay that I read, "Photography of Sound Waves "and the Demonstration of the Evolutions "of Reflected Wave-fronts with the Cinematograph", which sounds very complicated, and in fact, I think I understood maybe a tenth of the essay, but it was interesting, nonetheless. But what I got out of it is that Wood is trying to explain the nature of single-point waves. He was very frustrated with the students, that couldn't seem to grasp the difference between a wave and a front, and instead of trying to explain it through mathematical equations, he decided to use pictures. So what he did was take a single, single wave-point and he photographed this with a cinematograph, and this was the result. Here on this next slide, you can see a diagram which are abstractions of the results which I then took and cut fluorescent discs that have these patterns etched on them. I don't have an image yet of what the room is going to look like since I'm still working on it, but I basically created 24 discs with these wave-patterns on them. And they're going to be hanging in a room that is lit with ultraviolet light, with black light. So, I also wanted to talk about some precedents. Artists that I've collaborated with, scientists, artists that have crossed over to other disciplines. And I think two artists that I have always found very interesting are Robert Irwin and James Turrell. This is an image of them collaborating at the Garrett Corporation in Los Angeles. They were investigating sensory deprivation studies. And this was part of an art and technology program initiated by LACMA, the LA County Museum of Art, in 1967. So, here we have James Turrell and Robert Irwin in what's called an anechoic chamber, which is a room designed to absorb reflections of sound or electromagnetic waves. I don't know, have any of you been in an anechoic chamber before? It's quite a scary, but amazing experience. Of course, artists are tricksters, and they thought it would be a great idea to lock people up for 10 minutes at a time, switch off all the lights and see what happens. So what happened was participants came out a little freaked out, most of them. They started hallucinating, they started hearing things. Some of them reported that they could hear their heartbeat, which was disconcerting for some. Some even said they could hear their blood flow, which I find dubious, but you never know. Some of them said they tried to clap, and they could hear the bones crack in their body. This led them to investigate this kind of experiments further. Robert Irwin worked with sensory deprivation. Turrell moved forward into what's called the "ganzfeld experiment". And most of his work, as you'll see in the next couple slides, he really expanded on this one idea of sensory deprivation and visual deprivation, and it really informed the rest of his career. So, what is ganzfeld? Ganzfeld is German for "entire visual field". It describes this unsettling sensation when you experience total visual deprivation. It's often experienced by Arctic explorers and pilots that navigate dense fog and blinding snowstorms. You lose all sense of up and down and left and right. So, when everything in the visual field is the same color and brightness, the visual system shuts down. And in this homogenous field white equals black equals nothing. And when this occurs for extended period of time, a viewer can become subject to hallucinations, or so-called "prisoner cinema". They also call it "prisoner cinema" because of people

that are being put in isolation for a very long time

they've reported to experience similar effects that you would if you experienced a Ganzfeld Experiment. A very cheap way of experimenting with ganzfeld is to take a ping pong ball, cut it in half, put it on your eyes and stare at red light for, if you can, longer than five minutes. I just wanted to show that ganzfeld really can be any color. And of course, here it's very ha6rd to see, but it could be blue, it could be white. Flood is a piece I made in 2012 while I was at MIT, which revisits these experiments of Turrell and Irwin. Viewers would wear custom-made goggles, and inside the goggles there's acetate back-lit projector foam. This is foam, it's back-lit foam basically, and it's foam that allows for light to come through, but not color or shape, no form, only light. And what I did, what I subjected them to, was put them seven feet away from a very large screen and flashed very bright colors very fast. Needless to say, a few people had to leave; I had to have a warning, as well. But, so these bright, luminous colored planes were projected from an overhead projector, and I had a score accompanying it

with very simple frequencies

either extremely low or extremely high, according to what I was projecting. And what I was trying to see is, well,

first of all

is there any connection between color, light and sound? It's every artist's obsession, of course. I've pretty much come to the conclusion that at the moment it seems quite arbitrary. I know we often talk about synesthesia and how we have connections between color or light and sensation or taste. I just feel like it's still very subjective. So,

I'm still questioning

is there a connection? And I asked people afterwards what they saw, and people reported different things which lead me to believe that the way we experience light is still very, very subjective. These are called "bed specs" that I discovered. So, after I designed these goggles, I got interested in, you know, looking more into like what kind of different glasses, or how can I individualize an experience when I have several people in the room. So, I thought, "why I can, I can make glasses", and then I found these glasses. They're called "bed specs", and they sort of work like a periscope. But the idea is that you can just lay in bed, and you don't have to crank your neck to read; you can just lie down and read. There's no equivalent for the Dutch word "tasten", but it basically means to search or hunt with your eyes in the dark. I'm very inspired as well by Lee Ufan who is a Korean minimalist painter and sculpture based in Japan. I'm not going to show any of his work right now, but this quote is from Lee Ufan, "The hand becomes an eye that fuses all five senses "and sees things whole." He's also an advocate of de-modernization and de-Westernization in theory and practice. So, I was reading a lot about Lee Ufan's ideas and thinking about these "bed specs", and designed a piece called "Seeing Away". This was a piece made in 2012 where I got to terrorize my professors. I gave them these glasses to wear,

and I asked them to engage with every-day objects

pens, glasses, food, champagne. Needless to say, champagne was first to go, and then things got really fun. And I asked them to perform everyday actions, like eating, drinking, writing, conversing. Some even tried to walk around. But the effect is quite disconcerting when you have these glasses on. They're really meant to be lying down, lying still and reading a book. But once you start getting up and interacting with the world, strange things start happening. I thought this experiment was going to last about 15 minutes, but people stayed in the room for two hours. This was the initial set-up. I tried really hard to find glasses that didn't have tiger-print on them. So I was very upset at first; but, you know, everyone liked it, they preferred it even. This was the set-up of the whole table. I think there were about 20 people. If anyone would like to invite me to repeat this experiment, I would be very happy to; it's very fun. Which brings me to phenomenology, which is something I thought about a lot while I was in school. It comes from an academic disciplines of philosophy and psychology, based on the work of philosophers Edmund Husserl and later developed by Heidegger. And I put this description up here which can be very confusing, so I wrote a couple more notes to maybe help us understand a little bit more. In its broader sense, phenomenology refers to a person's perception of the meaning of an event as opposed to the event as it exists externally or outside of that person. The focus of phenomenologic inquiry is what people experience in regard to some phenomenon or other and how they interpret those experiences. A phenomenological research study is a study that attempts to understand people's perceptions, perspectives and understandings of a particular situation or a phenomenon. In other words, a phenomenological, always fun to say,

research study tries to answer the question

what is it like to experience such-and-such? Back to the work of James Turrell, who is really interested in this idea of thresholds of perception, and he's also very interested in phenomenological events and occurrences. These pieces that he made, has anyone experienced a Turrell piece in real life? They are incredible and very mysterious. There is absolutely no way an image can do justice to his work. What you see right here is basically a large room that is lit very, very evenly, which, trust me, is really hard to do. And at the end, another light source that's so evenly lit that it seems as if it's one wall with a sticker on it, or a piece of paper. Yet, when you go close by and you stick your hand in, the space continues. They've had to start putting warning signs on the walls, unfortunately, because people fell into these spaces, which is a shame, because for me the whole beauty of these kind of works is exactly that ethereal, you know, immersive power. The idea of visual ambiguity is nothing new, of course,

when you look at the Necker cube

the ambiguous line-drawing that, I'm sure, all of you are familiar with. Each part of the picture is ambiguous, but the human visual system picks one interpretation to make the whole consistent. You either see the one or the other. In James Turrell's "Afrum", he took this idea of the Necker cube and tried to reproduce it in light. So, using artificial light, he created disorientation of sensing space. Like the Necker illusion, "Afrum" can be cognitively manipulated to invert into corner or avert into a projected cube that juts out towards us. I tried to think about this in my own work. This is a piece called "Pattern is Movement" which will also be at the Madison Science Museum. This is a detail. I'll just go to the next slide so you can see more of what's actually going on here. There's no interpretation that achieves primacy here. There is no real object to be had, but rather, what I'm interested in here is how can we manipulate our own perceptional mechanisms. When you look at this piece for a long time, you start being confused with what's figure and what's ground.

I've always been interested in that concept

how do we know what's in front of us and what's behind? We have this automatic way of being able to tell. So, obvious an artist, I like to mess around with that. Which brings me to defamiliarization. Which is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in unfamiliar or strange ways in order to enhance perception of the familiar. It's a literary device coined by Viktor Shklovsky in his essay "Art as Device". This was written in 1917. And on the left, you'll see an image of "Gulliver's Travels" which is a book which is full of defamiliarization where scale is taken to extremes, in order for you to rethink, you know, what are these situations. Defamiliarization is a central concept in 20th century art and theory, and ranges over movements, including Dada, Postmodernisim, Epic Theatre, Science Fiction, to name only a few. And it's really this paragraph in the essay that caught my eye, "The purpose of art is to impart "the sensation of things as they are perceived "and not as they are known. "The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar" "and to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty "and length of perception "because the process of perception "is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." I really agree with this sentiment and in all my work I always try to think, "Is this what I'm doing?" If you say to something, "I'm trying to make it difficult", that actually is a good thing, because it awakens your senses. It breaks free of this habitual perception that we're all experiencing right now with all the screens that're around us. Case in point.

So the idea of signal and noise ratio

why are we always trying to find the signal, and we ignore the noise? And what happens is, we miss things. So as an artist, maybe it's not about the signal; maybe it's about the noise. How do we pick up the signal, ignore the noise, vice versa? How do we find things that we're not necessarily looking for? Is there a way to defamiliarize something as simple as the sky, something we look at every day, something that just seems so familiar that we barely even look at the sky? James Turrell has found a way how to do that in his Skyspace works. It's basically a natural light show. And what he does is create apertures in spaces, so that you can look at the sky in a different way. By framing a natural phenomena, he creates a new context for looking and seeing. Some more Skyspaces. I believe there are about 30, 40, 50, I'm not sure at this point how many there are around the world where you can experience Skyspaces, but you can... Some of them that stay open after sunset, it's amazing to sit there and see how the sky slowly shifts during sunset, which is a vastly different experience than sitting, for example, on the beach to watch the sunset. So of course, Turrell had to buy a crater in 1974. He was a pilot and decided to find a big, big space to continue his work. "At Roden Crater I was interested in taking "the cultural artifice of art out into the natural surround. "I did not want the work to be a mark upon nature, "but I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature "in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars "empowered the spaces. "I wanted an area...", it's rather a large area, "...where you had a sense of standing on the planet." Roden Crater is not open to the public yet. I hope that I get to see it soon. But here on the left is an image of the eye, the so-called eye of the Roden Crater, another Skyspace, quite a large one. And of course, when we go back to the Pantheon, we can see the similarities and the same fascination that still exists with us. And just to finish off, I wanted to include a few more precedents of artists that work in the sphere of art, science and technology and cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, hybrid, or, as they say at the media lab, anti-disciplinary. There are so many words for it now. This is an ex-professor of mine, Neri Oxman, who's from the Mediated Matter Group. Mediated Matter implies that in nature all matter is mediated by its environment. In other words, plants and animals must adapt to survive, and Oxman believes that this concept applies to art and design as well. So, she's constantly trying to find these patterns and adapt them to design, to art. An example is the Silk Pavilion that was built in 2011 which studies how traditional ecology examines relationships between living organisms and their environment. Of course inspired by biomimicry as well. And in the Silk Pavilion, there were thousands upon thousands of silk worms that would work at this cocoon for, I think this took about three or four weeks before they had the entire space covered, to spin a 3-D cocoon out of a single multi-property silk thread. So, each silk worm has about a kilometer of silk. The overall geometry of the pavilion was created using an algorithm that assigns a single, continuous thread across patches, providing various degrees of density. Just some more images of the sort of work that Neri is doing. For me another hugely influential artist, Olafur Eliasson, a Danish artist, whose work focuses on natural phenomena, and really someone who embraces this idea of cross-disciplinary work. But also what I find interesting about him is he's reimagining the role of the artist and also the idea of a studio. He's created a lab for inter-disciplinary thought and practice and has about 80 or 88 people working with him, ranging from architects to gardeners, to cooks, to painters. And they all get together, they eat lunch together, and they create together. He does anything from commissions to museum shows to, for example, his most famous piece which is one of his earlier piece called the "Weather Project", which was at the Tate Modern, which represented the sun and the sky in a turbine hole. And mist was sprayed in the room, and he used mono-frequency lamps to emulate radiation from the sun. And of course, it being London, you can imagine how popular this was. "Take Your Time", another piece. And I think this is a good slide to end with. This really sort of gives you a feeling of what the "Weather Project" felt like. People were just lying there for hours, just looking at this light. And it sort of, to me, said so much about what art can achieve in a large space, a small space, just by using light. And I think, I'll leave it at that. Thank you very much. (applause)