Art, outreach and geopattern formation

Abstract:

For the past several years, I have been exhibiting images and videos of natural and laboratory geopatterns in art galleries and outdoor shows. I have also brought artists into my research lab for hands-on workshops. My experience shows that scientific images can be well received as art and generate wide-ranging discussions across traditionally separate disciplines. The art world offers an interesting new venue for outreach activities, as well as being a lot of fun to explore.

Artists Statement:

I am interested in self-organized, emergent patterns and textures. I take photos of patterns both from the natural world and of experiments in my laboratory in the department of Physics at the University of Toronto. Patterns naturally attract casual attention but are also the subject of serious scientific research. Some things just evolve all by themselves into strikingly regular shapes and textures. Why? These shapes emerge spontaneously from a dynamic process of growing, folding, cracking, wrinkling, branching, flowing and other kinds of morphological development. My photos are informed by the scientific aesthetic of nonlinear physics, and mathematics lurks behind every image for those who know where to look for it. But no special knowledge is required to appreciate the results. Each image shows an object, sometimes quite small and often familiar, with a self-composed regular structure. Some images are from laboratory physics experiments and some are from Nature, and all celebrate the subtle interplay of order and complexity in emergent patterns.