Dr. Gekelman's art

I thought that Dr. Gekelman's lecture this week was really interesting, but also extremely intense. It was pretty difficult to follow the whole lecture with only a basic physics background, but non-the-less there were very fascinating points made. I thought that his description and explanations of what plasma is were very informative. Furthermore, I really enjoyed how he portrayed his research not only as interesting science, but then expanded it the broad scale of the sun, and how those same basic properties they were observing in the lab were present in nature itself.

I think my favorite part of his lecture was he art that he showed from his lab. All of his data was very colorful and fascinating, but I really like the images that they rendered to be unique. I remember the electric currents with lightbulbs on them, reflected in a mirror and also the all the currents that were changed into snakes. I really liked these images and I thought that this was a really interesting idea that we never really covered in the class.

In this class we discussed a lot about artists and how they were trying to portray science, and we discussed a lot of scientists and their research, but we never really covered any scientists that were doing art. I guess we did cover Dr. Gimzewski, but he is collaborating with an artist, so that is why I do not include him. Dr. Gekelman's art was really interesting because it not only portrayed real plasma physics data, I felt like the images were truly unique because they came from a different perspective. The physicists seemed to be using their art to make their data seem even more unique and try to make their science gain even greater importance. I felt that this contrasted with the objective of many of the artists discussed this quarter. Many of the artists seemed to be skeptical of the nature of science, and there art was often commenting on the abuse of science and how it can lead to destruction. While this is definitely a generalization, I enjoyed the work from Dr. Gekelman's lab because I really felt like his art was just because they were truly stimulated by their scientific data. It seems that some unprovoked stimulation like this could really make some of the best art.

I was searching online and I found some more images of some scientists who transformed their science into art. The example here is from a contest. The artwork is of silicon dust pellets suspended in a plasma and then illuminated by a laser. I think that this artwork is really fun to observe and interesting. I also like to see that in the art there arises scientific principles. For example, if you look at the way the dust is illuminated by the laser and aligned in the plasma it is a very regular and repeated fashion.

I think that I am saying all this because I really like art to be about nature because of all, isn't nature the most amazing thing. I really enjoy photography and I think that I really enjoyed the scientists data and experiments which are turned into art because they are creating unique, novel perspectives of viewing nature. In doing so, they are using art to portray nature's beauty.