Mach Infinity- Holly Vesecky
In the Main Gallery
Opening 8pm-10pm March 11th, 2006

And featuring...

The history of elements in the universe, quasar absorption lines, and star formation
Dr. Bryan Penprase
4:30pm Sunday afternoon March 12
http://machineproject.com/lectures/penprase/

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Mach Infinity will consist of a geodesic dome containing a floral planatarium which proposes an alternative figurative technology for depiciting the 16th of Charles Messier's non-comet "fuzzy" objects, the Eagle Nebula.

The Eagle Nebula is a star-forming cloud of interstellar dust and gas 7,000 light years from Earth, Parts of the nebula resemble an array of towering columns, fumes of hydrogen gas spanning light years, filled with stars boiling into existence through photoevaporation.

While photographic images of the nebula are gorgeous, the scale and complexity represented in these images are reduced by our image-based culture to another pleasant prismatic display, drowned in a vast ocean of other screen-based audiovisual extravaganzas. Furthermore, these images of the nebula are themselves compressed by unimaginable distance, color enhancement, shifting non-visible spectra into the relatively narrow range of visible light, or the even smaller subset of printable color....

When we look at an image of the nebula, we are not seeing are not how the nebula "really" looks, but rather a complex metaphorical representation. We hope to challenge the widespread assumption of the eagle nebula -- and other natural phenomena -- as a mere visual spectacles, and in turn, ask viewers to consider the metaphorical nature of the most seemingly realistic rendering of data.

Flowers will be used to line the interior walls of a geodesic dome in gaseous paterns with a webbed network of petals and flower heads on mono-filament. The plants used will include scabiosa, hydrangea, roses and their petals, the centers of sunflowers, vanda orchid heads, peonies, chocolate cosmos, black callas, echineacia, and other seasonal flowers.

With this project -- a blending of botany, astrophysics and handicraft -- we hope to recapture a sense of wonder in the face of these awe-inspiring phenomena, to rediscover a poetics of data visualization.

This project was assisted in part by a grant from the Cookie Jar Fund of the Institute For Figuring