Clarendon Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Oxford.
Conversations Across Time, an 'un-play' and art-piece, is a hybrid of film, art and performance. It explores physics and in particular quantum information, quantum computing and AI, both currently and historically and has been designed to challenge perceptions of ourselves and others.
The project is led by Pamela Davis Kivelson, artist in residence at the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford.
For ‘Conversations Across Time’, she worked in collaboration with Cheryl Frances-Hoad, award-winning composer and Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford’s Keble College, as well as creative media charity, FilmOxford and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).
A black hole stretches, and tears apart all matter in its neighbourhood, even stars. The underlying mechanism is the strong tidal force exerted by the intense gravitational field of the black hole, which radically distorts spacetime itself. Pamela Davis Kivelson worked with physicists to plot black hole orbits that visualise the ways in which multimedia works and paintings of astronomical size would get distorted, break apart, and disintegrate in the vicinity of a black hole. Part of the image spirally falls into the black hole, while the rest picks up enough energy to escape the black hole.