Gravity-like pressure fluctuations created by voice encoded light causes the behavior of levitated graphite particles to mirror words encoded in the light.
Instruments of Material Poetry
Instruments of Material Poetry was first designed and conceived for the Mitsukoshi Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 1992. Subsequent installations have been shown at SOLART Interactive, The Kunsthochschule fur Medien, Koln,1994; Light, Space, and Time, The MIT Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995; Chaos of Delight, The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, Delaware, 1996. Most recently the project was recommissioned for Arp's Peculiar Universe, The International Astronomical Union's, Hubble Telescope Anniversary Exhibition, The Schneider Museum, Ashland, Oregon, 2009.
Photons have no mass, but they can impart their kinetic energy to another object when they strike it. If the photons striking the surface of an object is reflected 100% - like with a mirror - the radiation pressure doubles. In a pure vacuum - where all radiometric forces from heated gas is removed - this energy from light can be harnessed with enough force and precision to create a strong localized gravitational-like force field that can be used to levitate and manipulate tiny objects.
Using a modified 50 million candlepower xenon white light source, Instruments of Material Poetry constructs a powerful micro-gravitational environment that levitates a dense cluster of highly reflective microscopic graphite particles in a vacuum chamber. Mirroring celestial mechanics and the images of distant galaxies, as the particles levitated in Instruments of Material Poetry interact with the light, they slowly coalesce into a flat oblate disk, and over time the particles form a highly stable miniature galaxy-like structure floating in a 1000 ml glass flask.
The xenon light source developed for Instruments of Material Poetry is specially designed with its power supply modified for a sub-carrier to create amplitude modulation. Much like a radio station, the sub-carrier allows for voice or data to be directly encoded into the light, and its force field to create variable intensity radiation pressure. The shifting pressure created by voice encoding in the light modulates the local field of gravity for the levitated graphite particles causing there behavior to change mirroring the words in the light.
A suite of poems were originally used as the levitation sound source for Instruments of Material Poetry. The following is an excerpt from 1991 Curious Miracles, one of the poems from the suite.
"Poised on the edge of the earth, umbilical cord still tied to the infinite amniotic universe, I pause for a moment and reflect on the weary caravan of travelers across the night sky. Wild vortex, abyss of blue... I know harnessed away deep inside of me at the smythe of my soul lies the binding energy, the imponderable window, the vista. Calling me, beckoning me like the maelstrom. Pulling, seducing, descending life back towards the original singularity. Expertly eroding the temporary constructs of this world. Wedding me, connecting me with the knowing. Ancient language which I've forgotten, words but that I know better than my own voice. Knowingly they accelerate, radiance swallowed in hordes by the abysmal chasm... deaf eyes. Bitter harvest, seeds sewn from the primordial garden. Staring hypnotized into the core, the voice of the light that died to give me life. I am of dead light, ashes of a dead star."
Custom lasers, photonics and electronics listen to the modulated light scattered from the thousands of spinning particles in the miniature galaxy. The heavily doppler shifted light signals from the particles are detected and amplified as audible sound in the installation. This is heard as an eccentric choir of transformed voices repeating the poetic writings encoded by the artist into the light. A closed circuit stereo video-microscopy system allows for real-time viewing via large scale stereo 3D video projection of the miniature galaxy's formation and evolution. The tiny galaxy's shape is constantly changing, yet confined by the laws of physics to endlessly echo the poems encoded in the light, poems made of words, light and matter.