For Álvaro de Campos, one of the poet Fernando Pessoa's various heteronyms, "Newton's binomial is as beautiful as the Venus de Milo". The same can be said of Einstein's famous equation, one of the most important of twentieth-century physics, whose mathematics can be understood by a child. In physics, the beauty of the equations is often spoken of as a fundamental criterion, a beauty that is revealed in the extreme simplicity of the statement allied to a power of universal scope. And will not the arts be sciences of imaginary worlds? In this work, the relationship between mass, energy and the speed of light is expressed in the form of three thousand LED lights, organized in fifty meters of NeoPixel stripes, which form a three-dimensional suspended sculpture. As envisaged by Einstein, light does not travel in a straight line, but it curves as if attracted by an invisible matter. The same happens in Van Gogh or Delaunay. The curvature of light then reveals something much deeper: if light always takes the shortest path, then that curvature corresponds to the deformation of space-time itself. Contrary to what Newton and Kant thought, space and time are not, after all, the fixed, unchanging background in which everything that exists appears. Space and time are dynamic. They can vibrate, and resonate like a drum. Music is the sonorous expression of this gravitational energy. A violin electronically transformed and diffused over four separated channels mirrors the movements of light through the Cosmos. Music and light art are unified through rhythm and through the relativity of simultaneity. The spectral composition of light, manifested as color, expresses the internal composition of matter. In this work, the effects of light are inspired by various natural phenomena: the sun that hits the waves and is reflected in a myriad of infinite scintillations; the fire, where variations of red correspond to different temperatures; thunder, electric shocks of unpredictable location; "waves of light" of different lengths, speeds and colors, which can overlap with themselves; the rainbow, which always seems to be at the same distance, and which thus stands on the border between reality and illusion.
E = mc2, 2018
NeoPixel Digital RGB LED, Arduino Mega, Raspberry Pi, muslin fabric and foam Light and sound composition: 6' 02''
Variable dimensions