The Universe Gallery
July 4th, 2007
Mulberry School for Girls have had a project for the last year about the origins of the universe. Its about teaching science and encouraging girls to do science, but the approach has been interdisciplinary, involving drama, art, religious studies, to explore the relevance of the scientific theory to them.
The project was shortlisted for the Rolls Royce Science Award and has been about creating a ‘Universe Gallery’. Arts Catalyst worked with Deborah Colvin, the science teacher to bring in artists whose practice investigates science. Tony Hall worked with the students on an interactive sound installation that includes conversations about the origins of the universe and they also put together an LED line along the floor of the corridor with lights going from blue to red, to represent the red shift. The corridor has four display/light boxes of artworks, books, cakes, automata made during the school’s exploration of the theme as well as a timeline describing events from the big bang to the formation of our sun.
The plan is, next year to begin work on the next corridor which will be about the next 4.5 billion years of Earth’s existence.
Initially I was asked to create work with the students for one of the display boxes. I was at the Space Science Lab in Berkeley, California at the time, researching satellites. George Smoot had just been awarded the Nobel Prize with Jon Mather for their research into cosmic background microwave radiation - the remnant of the big bang - and it is from these theories that our understanding of what might have happened is derived. I told him about the project I would be doing on the origins of the universe with Mulberry School for Girls. He mainly uses data from the satellite COBE. There is another satellite WMAP which also measures the background radiation, which I knew about from chatting with Mark Halpern at UBC, Vancouver.
I’ve wanted to work with groups of people to create alternative satellite constellations. I began making collages myself in Berkeley using what you might call anarchist propaganda, which would be handed out to me on my way to the zen-like hilltop Space Science Lab. I loved to gather the voices of different people everyday on these pieces of paper and I began to make satellite collages from them, as a tribute to their protests and because I wanted this street culture to be part of the culture of Space.
When they are inverted, they can look something like satellites and as all satellites are designed uniquely, you can be fairly imaginative with what you decide to put into Space.
It felt wonderful to be in the science class at Mulberry School, real progress, to be an artist collaborating with the students. I talked to them about being at Berkeley and the satellites that scientists use to gather evidence about origins of the universe. We looked at the many designs of satellites, their instruments, solar panels and the bus housing the computer and communications hardware.
I asked them about how they could see time had passed, in anything other than a clock and they wrote down ideas, like changes in trees, when people look older. Someone wrote that you can tell time has passed because you become more intelligent. Clocks make us forget what time is. The concepts of time around the theories of the origins of the universe are vastly abstract, so I wanted to find another anchor for thinking about time.
We looked at pictures of the Hubble Space Telescope and I showed some movies of the astronauts I’d seen at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre training for the space walks next year to repair the lens. I showed them photos taken by Hubble and explained this unearthly phenomenon that light traveled for billions of years to reach the Hubble camera, so it is an image from far in the past, this is not what it looks like now. To think about this, I asked them to bring to mind images in their head from the past, light in their memory from the past, a happy memory. I liked asking them how they remembered, I’d no idea how twelve year olds remembered, how they held memories in their minds or what the relevance of memories were when you are young. It was difficult for them to think about this.
So using the writing and science magazines they collaged their own satellite designs, satellites to measure the time and space of their universe. I photographed each collage, inverted the colours with Photoshop and put together the light box image of satellites orbiting the planet earth.
Many people wrote about a brother or sister being born or their birthdays, which were amazingly appropriate for the gallery about the birth of the universe.
The other three display cabinets had Tony Hall’s interactive sound piece, a cabinet of various pieces made across the school and one about the fabric of time and space, which I also helped put together and I did another workshop filming waves with a group of students for a video projection in the corridor.
This was the planned finish of the corridor and the school sent in their documentation to Rolls Royce for the judging. At the award ceremony at the Science Museum, London, Mulberry School was announced Runner Up, a huge honour!
The opening of the gallery was scheduled for the end of the month, however the head teacher suggested they also use the other side of the corridor to create a timeline of the history of the universe. With 2 weeks to go, I went back to the school to do a marbling workshop - the suggestion of Kay, the art teacher.
Deborah had prepared the marbling inks. I thought we’d be in the art room, but test tubes of ink and dissection trays of water were ready for eight science classes to do marbling.
Hundreds of pieces of marbling were made, which I arranged in a colour sequence and began designing the timeline. Deborah wanted the idea of a wave with a changing frequency to represent the timeline and marble circles seemed a good way to include so many students work in the design.
At the opening last Friday neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield launched the gallery.
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