the constructed fabric, the consciously-induced collapse into classicality, the chaos of cosmic censorship
SALMA RAGHEB
I am a visual studies student interested in exploring art’s capacity to criticize the shortcomings of science, particularly modern physics. My position as a visual studies and science student gives me a perspective on how each discipline criticizes or picks up the excluded subjects of the other.
Read the article in PDF form here.
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Figure 1. on the double-slit, collapsing the wave function, and quantum entanglement, 2024. Salma Ragheb.
Figure 2. orbitals, we don’t know where the electron is, 2024. Salma Ragheb.
For my thesis, I’m interested in generating a contemporary visual response to the disconnect between principles of modern physics.
In Einstein trapped in the (space-time) fabric, Einstein’s portrait is warped in nine variations using grid coordinates. Quantum mechanics describes the interactions of subatomic objects; whereas general relativity describes gravity as a space-time fabric that distorts under the motion of massive objects. The two systems are not compatible.
Physicists have been trying to achieve a unified theory that exhibits a coherent articulation from the physics of the tiny to that of the massive. These arguments often involve entertaining hypotheticals: working with a quantum particle construct of gravity called a graviton or proposing a unified theory like string theory whose functional applications require at least ten dimensions. Because of these constructs, attempts to reconcile quantum theory with relativity taper toward philosophical endeavours, with scarce experimental support or visual engagement.
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Figure 3. Einstein pencil grids, 2023. Salma Ragheb.
My research and studio practice responds to this gap with a visual discourse that concedes the absurdity of unification pursuits: the constructive imagination it often entails, the fundamental reduction of the world to a single grand theory, the staging of a discourse whose primacy and irreducibility are unstable, and the selective invention of mathematically convenient figments whose very unreality becomes the fault of the theory.
Along with painting, I am using collage to fray the edge between the staging of a controlled, ordered result and the recursive inevitability of physical chaos. Collage, then, acts as an agitation of an entropic eventuality. To collage is to peruse through found material and imagine different solutions for their merging. This is an act of indulging hypotheticals, testing imaginative pursuits with existing material, and finding reparative uses for visually discordant sources. In this limiting aspect of finding meaning only in that which is already available, I find surprising vastness.
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Figure 4. don’t look at the cat or the wave or the naked singularity, 2024. Salma Ragheb.
A salient thread in my work is the flirtation between appearance and disappearance and the tuning of visual immediacy and clarity through modalities of transparency, perforations, (alternative) blocking, and folding.
These interventions and items function to index specific concepts like quantum superposition and the collapse of the wave function and to visually connote representational formal qualities of the gridded space-time fabric and its perforated wormholes. These gestures can also accommodate a more general reading about reifying the inaccessibility and discontinuities in theoretical physics.
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Figure 5. individual paintings from Einstein trapped in the (space-time) fabric, 2024. Salma Ragheb.
I am a visual studies student interested in exploring art’s capacity to criticize the shortcomings of science, particularly modern physics. My position as a visual studies and science student gives me a perspective on how each discipline criticizes or picks up the excluded subjects of the other.
Read the article in PDF form here.
Figure 1. on the double-slit, collapsing the wave function, and quantum entanglement, 2024. Salma Ragheb.
Figure 2. orbitals, we don’t know where the electron is, 2024. Salma Ragheb.
For my thesis, I’m interested in generating a contemporary visual response to the disconnect between principles of modern physics.
In Einstein trapped in the (space-time) fabric, Einstein’s portrait is warped in nine variations using grid coordinates. Quantum mechanics describes the interactions of subatomic objects; whereas general relativity describes gravity as a space-time fabric that distorts under the motion of massive objects. The two systems are not compatible.
Physicists have been trying to achieve a unified theory that exhibits a coherent articulation from the physics of the tiny to that of the massive. These arguments often involve entertaining hypotheticals: working with a quantum particle construct of gravity called a graviton or proposing a unified theory like string theory whose functional applications require at least ten dimensions. Because of these constructs, attempts to reconcile quantum theory with relativity taper toward philosophical endeavours, with scarce experimental support or visual engagement.
Figure 3. Einstein pencil grids, 2023. Salma Ragheb.
My research and studio practice responds to this gap with a visual discourse that concedes the absurdity of unification pursuits: the constructive imagination it often entails, the fundamental reduction of the world to a single grand theory, the staging of a discourse whose primacy and irreducibility are unstable, and the selective invention of mathematically convenient figments whose very unreality becomes the fault of the theory.
Along with painting, I am using collage to fray the edge between the staging of a controlled, ordered result and the recursive inevitability of physical chaos. Collage, then, acts as an agitation of an entropic eventuality. To collage is to peruse through found material and imagine different solutions for their merging. This is an act of indulging hypotheticals, testing imaginative pursuits with existing material, and finding reparative uses for visually discordant sources. In this limiting aspect of finding meaning only in that which is already available, I find surprising vastness.
Figure 4. don’t look at the cat or the wave or the naked singularity, 2024. Salma Ragheb.
A salient thread in my work is the flirtation between appearance and disappearance and the tuning of visual immediacy and clarity through modalities of transparency, perforations, (alternative) blocking, and folding.
These interventions and items function to index specific concepts like quantum superposition and the collapse of the wave function and to visually connote representational formal qualities of the gridded space-time fabric and its perforated wormholes. These gestures can also accommodate a more general reading about reifying the inaccessibility and discontinuities in theoretical physics.
Figure 5. individual paintings from Einstein trapped in the (space-time) fabric, 2024. Salma Ragheb.