BLUE
New York, 2024
Blue laser, adjustable micrometer slit, ultrasonic sensor disks, circuit boards, batteries, humidifier rods, water, wood.
In the central installation there is a blue laser beam that cuts through the middle of the gallery space. The blue light is only made visible when it interacts with water vapor emitted from atomizers underneath the blue line. Water vapor causes refraction in the blue light, creating a whisper of a visible moment, or a twinkle effect to appear and disappear from sight. The blue line travels across the gallery space and through a micrometer slit located on the sister pedestal. For more information about this aspect of the exhibition please visit the artwork Uncertainty around the corner in Gallery C.
This piece is an invitation to spend time with the color blue and to consider it beyond previous conceptions. In a search for understanding the color blue, I thought about the natural occurrence of blue in my everyday life such as the sky or water. I began to question the color blue as a phenomenon that is observed to exist or happen and how it has been explained. The more I learned about the physics of light and our perception of the color blue, the more I came to understand it as a reminder of the uncertainty of our world. In the same way that the blue horizon of an ocean is never quite a fixed distance; it is always in motion, oscillating, vibrating, and alive.
The blue line in this installation is the gallery space’s own horizon. When observing the light, it is difficult to perceive its depth as it too acts as an unattainable threshold. The blue line provides a visual representation of the space between something that is no longer and not yet; a liminal space.
UNCERTAINTY
2024
Video
This artwork showcases a specific phenomenon associated with the blue laser light, present in the artwork Blue in gallery B. When the blue laser light travels through the micrometer slit, it creates a blue dot on the wall behind the slit. If we were to advance the micrometer slit, the size of the slit narrows from left to right, creating a smaller distance for the blue light to travel through. As this gap narrows, the blue dot on the wall behind it also begins to narrow; the dot's sides getting visually cut off by the sides of the slit. In a moment right before the gap completely closes, the dot on the wall gets wider. The blue dot forms into a horizontal oval, scatters left to right, and then disappears.
One way of describing this phenomenon is that there is inherent uncertainty in the act of measuring the variability of a particle. This idea is commonly applied to the position and momentum of a particle, where the more precisely the position is known the more uncertain the momentum is and vice versa. However, there are many ways to interpret a phenomenon, especially if we consider light in wave form instead of a particle.
The horizontal scattering of light remains hidden in the accompanying piece Blue because the blue laser line is traveling at around 450 nanometers. As the laser dot is cast on the wall it is reflected back to our eyes and will not change in frequency. When the laser line is refracted through the water vapor, the number in nanometers increases, placing the blue light in a safe viewing category similar to an LCD screen.
Through my investigations of the color blue, I have come to understand it as the epitome of uncertainty. When attempting to document the horizontal scattering phenomenon using a digital camera, each piece of technology changed the blue color to purple or violet. The video piece is a color-edited version of the laser light. The frequency of blue is not capturable digitally and only perceivable through our eyes.
DEPTH
New York, 2024
Tracing paper, pins
FREQUENCY
New York, 2024
Tracing paper, pins
SCATTER
New York, 2024
Tracing paper, pins
STILL
New York, 2024
Tracing paper, pins
These poems are about tapping into the phenomena present in our everyday lives. For just a small moment, they ask a viewer to consider a different point of view. To invite them to see what has always been in front of them for the first time.