Revealing the Galactic Weirdness of Quasars Through Art

Have you ever seen a quasi-stellar radio source (aka a quasar)? Of course not. You probably have never even heard the term before, which is affectionately used to describe mysterious hotbeds of electromagnetic energy that form around black holes out in space. But never fear--Jean-Michel Crettaz and Mark David Hosale, the two creators behind slap!HQ, are offering you the chance to observe a synthetic reproduction of one.

Scientists are still piecing together the little information we have about these naturally occurring phenomena, but what we do know is this: quasars are a compact region surrounding a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Though they are extremely bright and powerful, much more so than the sun, they remain difficult to detect. Weird, huh?

Jean-Michel Crettaz, an engineer and architect based in Los Angeles, and Mark David Hosale, a composer and media artist currently based in Toronto, are amongst those cosmos enthusiasts who enjoy decoding and contemplating outer space. Motivated by their interest in the quasar phenomenon, the two artists created an interactive light and sound installation, titled Quasar, which reproduces its astronomical properties on a smaller scale.

“The name Quasar is derived from more or less mysterious astronomical events understood as extremely ancient and highly luminous events that occur in the furthest known reaches in our known Universe," explain Crettaz and Hosale. "The significance of quasars to the work is that they represent the edge of what can be seen and known, they are a demarcation of our epistemological horizon.”

The Quasar body is embedded with scores of microcontrollers that control a large sensor array that draws data from the installation’s surroundings and hundreds of LEDs that light up the fibre optic strands. The team collected several layers of data about high energy neutrino events from weather stations in Antarctica and the ICECUBE particle detector at the South Pole, as well as information about local electromagnetic fields. Sensors in the installation itself track visitors' movements in the space, adding a real-time data stream into the piece.

Slap!HQ will present the 4th version of Quasar this September at the Land|Slide exhibition in Markham, Ontario. 

This post originally appeared at the Creator's Project.