'Artful Quandary' at CityArts
We came across this interesting article on CityArts, Artful Quandary by Tim Appelo, and wanted to share it with you.
Science and art collide in the mind of artist Julian Voss-Andreae. The Bravern reaps the benefits.
Julian Voss-Andreae’s new sculpture at the Bravern, Quantum Man, is beautiful to look at, but that’s not the point. The idea of the piece is to convey one of the most bewildering ideas in modern physics: that nothing is really the way it looks, that all matter can be seen as a bunch of particles or as a collection of waves. It cannot possibly be both, yet somehow it is.
Voss-Andreae, who grew up playing with Lego blocks in Germany, first decided to be an artist. Then, at the University of Vienna, he switched to quantum physics and started playing with buckyballs, tiny soccer-ball-shaped icosahedrons made of sixty carbon atoms. They’re called buckyballs because they look like the geodesic domes designed by R. Buckminster Fuller, the famous cousin of Seattle Art Museum founder Richard Fuller. Voss-Andreae’s team won fame by shooting a single buckyball through two openings at once, each a hundred times farther apart than a buckyball is wide. Impossible! But that’s quantum physics for you…
