New Installation Uses Pendulums To Explore Force Fields

Earlier this year we found ourselves surrounded by galactic black holes, exploring the unknown with Quasar, an immersive installation created by Los Angeles-based architects and artists Jean-Michel Crettaz and Myles Sciotto. For their newest project, Imum Coeli, they've built an installation that offers a dynamic physical visualization of invisible magnetism.

Imum Coeli--derived from Latin, meaning the lowest point in the sky--is made up of three spheres suspended on top of a field of pendulums, the spheres measuring variables that calibrate their different orbits. The rotation of earth's magnetic poles, the fluctuation of solar time, and ambient electromagnetism (people, movements, and electronic gadgets close-by) are all analyzed and transcribed in order to create a visual and audible experimental space that is constantly evolving.

As a bridge between the public and the ambient fields of energy, Imum Coelis offers a unique invitation to experience our environment from a new perspective. To find out more details about this mesmerizing installation, we spoke with Jean-Michel Crettaz.

The Creators Project: What do you think about the influence of science on creative and artistic fields, and in your case, how do you integrate them into your practice?
Jean-Michel Crettaz: At a research level, both art and science are highly creative disciplines and in that sense they are interconnected and interchangeable. The discipline of art-science provides a vessel to engage and reflect upon aspects of technological evolution…and by doing so, provides a criticality to new boundaries that are otherwise hard to come by.

Discoveries in the sciences, as well as new art-science projects, arise from the inventive interplay of concepts and ideas; Art fires up imagination and perceptive modes of reflection within the flow of historic events--whereas the sciences operate within timeless concepts. The fascination lies in the intersection of both right and left hemispheres that synthesize complexity and ideas born in and returned to the human mind.

Do you consider your practice to be science in the service of art or the opposite?
The work clearly belongs to the discipline of art as we take liberties in interpolating complex phenomenon into experientially digestible dimensions and pose criticality to standardized forms of visualization. Interestingly, both condense into an overlapping conversation on the fascination with, and potential use of, the deliberated concepts.

About Imum Coeli, where did the idea come from?
IC, Imum Coeli, lowest point in the sky, is an old idea that concretized after the revisiting writings of Galilei Galileo, alongside cosmic magnetism, clock mechanisms, and quantum phenomena in nuclear physics.

The idea was to continue to develop synthetic ecologies constituting different scales in space and time (history) by connecting ideas of new technologies tracing scalar energy patterns and environmental magnetism, with simple gravitational and mechanical concepts belonging to Copernicus and Newton.

In IC we continued to explore the realm of invisible energies, energy pattern and entropy, to bring invisible force fields into tangible and experiential dimensions of movement, light, and sound.

You are the leader of this project but it's also a team effort. How did the collaboration flow?
Slap (our collective) is a consortium of collaborators contributing their field of expertise. The projects evolve around a shared research idea, rather than a specific form or determined outcome.

The design process is the result of intense conversations, research, testing material and fabrication possibilities, tweaking, and the re-adjusting of goals. Meetings take place in the studio and operate on a flat pyramid structure with everyone present contributing equally. The working structure invites people to become creative beyond their actual field of expertise.

The project united a multitude of design fields: physical pendulums design, fabrication, computational coding of controls for sound, light, visualization, motors, cameras, and other electronic controls and sensors.

Can you explain to us the guidelines of this project and could you give us a few technical details?
The project orchestrates three forms of magnetic energies. solar and space magnetism, magnetic shift at the earth poles, and local electromagnetic fields. The information is harvested to inform and conceive an instrument synthesizing these force fields into a new experience.

Magnetic field data streams are web sourced, and harvested from local EM sensors that are consolidated in MAX/MSP/Jitter, a real-time computing tool designed cycling74 that controls light, sound, and the movement of the three main pendulum spheres. The visualization by Adam Ferriss is written in C++ and derives its data stream from 2 suspended webcams tracking the pendulum field works.

Do you think there are limits in the visualization of such phenomena via the use of new technologies? Is so, what are they?
New evolving technologies are providing innovative ways to see deeper. IC is a work that likes to take part in the equation of reflecting how we understand our world.

What effect are you trying to produce through this exploration and what should we get from this?
Not unlike Carom, a 17thC Royal game with three spheres representing a cosmic game, IC is an instrument to play the scales and contemplate our awareness of invisible energies of the known universe.

Last question, you presented IC for the very first time at the end of 2013. You were thus able to appreciate and analyze how the public and the space interacted with the piece. I imagine that you would now like to make it evolve. What's the next step?
We are in conversation with science museums and planetariums--our aim is to find a space that expands the spatial depth of the experience. Spatial qualities and reverberation are major components to the work.

For more on the project check out the videos below:

IMUM Coeli: PendulumField from soCinematic.

Imum Coeli: Pendulum Field from soCinematic.

Visualization: Adam Ferriss

Team:
Sandra Sadauskaite
Hideyo Kameda
Molly Hubley 
Lori Choi

All images courtesy of IC Pendulum Fields.