Leonardo

E x h i b i t i o n Cosmic Titans: Art, Science and the Quantum Universe Lakeside Arts, University Park, Nottingham, UK. 25 January–27 April 2025. Reviewed by Edith Doove. Email: contact@bureaudoove.com. https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON.r.78 Despite its relatively small size, Cosmic Titans is an exhibition as intense as its name indicates. Named after the massive galaxies such as the recently discovered Hyperion, it shows the work of nine artists that were invited for a residency at the ARTlab that was founded by Silke Weinfurtner and Ulrike Kuchner in 2022 at the University of Nottingham. While Weinfurtner is based in the School of Mathematical Sciences and a pioneer in the field of black hole simulations, Kuchner is a senior researcher in Astronomy and Art-Science collaborations in the School of Physics and Astronomy. Their exhibition, cocurated with Neil Walker, Head of Visual Arts Programming at Lakeside Arts and Helen Kennedy of the Virtual and Immersive Production Studio , celebrates the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. While the university finds itself at the forefront of research into quantum physics, with its ARTlab and this exhibition it can now also be said to be at the forefront of exemplary artscience collaborations. Cosmic Titans is an excellent example of a transdisciplinary art-science collaboration [1]. Working alongside researchers in quantum physics, the invited artists were commissioned to contribute six new works for the exhibition. Apart from the fact that these “give expression to the excitement, wonder and poetry of cutting-edge scientific discovery that is transforming our future” [2], which appeals to a large audience, the artistic visualization also provides new insights for the scientists . As Weinfurtner and Kuchner explain in a video for The New Scientist , artistic skills make it possible to visualize or to make experiential abstract concepts that even for scientists are largely incomprehensible. To which the quantum world adds a specific kind of weirdness that artists are capable of transforming into an experience that can be seen, heard, and felt, thus “making the intangible tangible ” [3]. Although art-science collaborations in themselves are nothing new [4], one of the biggest challenges in any kind of art-science collaboration , whether inter- or transdisciplinary , in artlabs, art-based research or other, is finding a shared language. One way of finding this language is to give the collaboration sufficient time, something in which the project succeeded extremely well. While engaged in ongoing experiments, artists and scientists kept “Ping-Ponging back and forth,” resulting in the successful outcomes that can be seen in the exhibition. This might also be due to the fact that the combination of art and physics is, according to Kuchner in The New Scientist video, a particularly good match, as they have similar points of departure—setting something up, testing it, and adapting it until it works. The multisensory experience of Cosmic Titans starts with the impressive installation Ringdown by Royal Academician Conrad Shawcross. As the first resident during the summer of 2023, Shawcross visited the early universe laboratory of Weinfurtner. Upon seeing their experiments, he proposed a controlled experiment/ audiovisual artwork to visualize the moment just before two black holes collide and merge into one, for which ringdown is actually the scientific term. Set in motion by pushing a button and thus giving the audience agency, two huge bronze bells, set in a hanging geodesic hemisphere, slowly start to move, accelerate, and finally collide. Their action is accompanied by “a rising, chaotic and decelerating sound” as an expression of the enormous energy that is involved in the merging of black holes. The readings of sensors that measure the magnetic field of the artwork are displayed on a monitor in a laboratory-like setting; these data actually inform the scieneditor -in-chief Michael Punt associate editors Hanna Drayson, Dene Grigar, Jane Hutchinson A full selection of reviews is published monthly on the Leonardo website: www.leonardo.info/reviews. leonardo reviews Reviews Panel: Kathryn Adams, Cristina Albu, Jan Baetens, John Barber, Catalin Brylla, Rita Cachao, Iain Campbell, Judith A. Cetti, Chris Cobb, Giovanna L. Costantini, Edith Doove, Hannah Drayson, Phil Dyke, Ernest Edmonds, Phil Ellis, Anthony Enns, Jennifer Ferng, Bronac...