This is a work of art by artist Shinichi Maruyama. His pieces exist for only a specific, minute fragment of time: in some cases, as little as one 20,000th of a second.
The art, in other words, is not the photograph itself, or not only the photograph: the art is this swirl of water and ink, cast into the air by Maruyama's hands. Ultra high-speed photography is what allows us to see the result of his specific action--to spend human time, that is, luxuriating in its texture, its taught surfaces, its fragile edges, fraying and splitting into randomness.
I'll play my cards right away: I think this is excellent work. The almost monumental character of material so transient; the way it connects both to the ancient tradition of Japanese calligraphy--one thinks of "enso" paintings--and to the most recent images of spiral galaxies; even the way we can see the artist's kinetic energy still acting, with his body removed, in a manner that gestures toward both influence and impermanence. It all works.
To be sure, I am more interested in abstract art forms than some, as I've blogged about before. Jackson Pollock's flung paint makes immediate sense to my eye--and we had an interesting interchange on this site a while back about the question of beauty in physics, and what it implies about the G.U.T.--in a way that it doesn't to many. But I suspect even die-hard classicists can see some of the appeal of Maruyama's gestural splashes.
On occasion people write me to propose I blog about the intersection of art and physics. Back in the eighties there were entire bookshelves dedicated to this area; much of it, I suspect, driven by Douglas Hofstadter's brain-bending Godel, Escher, Bach. Since then, the computer and internet revolution has brought even more fire to the possibilities of cross-pollination. I can't say I spend much time thinking about the art-science nexus myself; oddly, perhaps, as I am both a visual artist (casually) and a physics enthusiast. But, for whatever reason, these "ways of looking" seem largely to occupy nonoverlapping magisteria in my neocortex. I love both, but in different ways. Perhaps you feel the same.
Still, in Maruyama's work I am reminded of how art and science are indeed kindred endeavors, and mutually supportive. There is something important in his dark cartwheel of water, suddenly frozen out and made permanent before us. Something having to do with the appreciation of time.
Here at FQXi, researchers contemplate such wonderful notions as reversible time, multiversal time, time as emergent, time as cosmic illusion, time as no illusion but quite real. Time in consciousness, time at the event horizon, time as analog and digital and more. These are rich and fascinating inquiries. Some of them--for me, multi-dimensional time is one--are rewarding even in the contemplation, leaving aside the question of their actual application to nature. (Scientific theories can be wrong, whereas artwork can only be more or less successful.) There is a pleasure akin to aesthetic experience simply in exercising the mind along such avenues of thought.
What Maruyama has me thinking now is this. From the perspective of a consciousness that goes through its processing cycle, let us say, once every hundred thousand years, the mountainscapes themselves would appear fluid. Such a perspective would watch the Himalayas rise, and erode, the way we watch ocean waves tumble. The ocean waves, meanwhile, would be far too brief for that mind to apprehend. But, for it, the tectonic plates might swim about the lithosphere like leaves eddying around a pool.
From another temporal perspective, revealed here by stroboscopic camera, a 10,000th or 20,000th of a second is a microcosm. Within that eyeblink is all this stability, this structure, this much fascinating detail. The gradual transfer of energy; the slow, complex interplay of mechanical forces; gravitation; angular momentum; surface tension. Every second that ticks past is composed of slivers such as these, in each of which nature is faithfully creating what Darwin, in the biological sphere, called "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."
It's artwork that, like paradigm-challenging science, wakes us up to the possibilities of time itself. I am grateful to Maruyama for helping me see how much I don't see.
