“Aphelios I” 远日点一号

‘Aphelios 1’ is a one-minute lopped surrealistic moving image installation artwork about the visual assumption of emergent space-time theory, partly empowered by an AI graphic program and overlaying visual elements from my still images. ‘Gravity is a hologram’, inspired by Monica Jinwoo Kang, a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Fellow in Theoretical Physics at Caltech when explaining the holographic principle, a central tenet of Zurek’s model.  This principle, realised using string theory in the 1990s, implies that phenomena in 3D, such as gravity, can emerge out of a flat 2D surface.  More specifically, gravity and space-time are thought to emerge from the entanglement of particles taking place on the 2D surface.  Entanglement occurs when subatomic particles are connected across space; the particles act as a single entity without direct contact with each other, somewhat like a flock of starlings.

In Zurek and Adhikari’s proposed experiment, they explain that gravity and space-time emerge out of the quantum horizon.  That fuzziness would represent the pixelation of space-time, and ‘Aphelios 1’ is an abstract piece showing where time differs between the macroscopic and microscopic worlds of physics but also merges between the two realities.  Aphelios comes from Greek, ‘apo’ means ‘far apart, away’, and ‘Helios’ is the Titan god of the sun.  In astronomy, ‘aphelion’ means ‘the point in the orbit of an object where it is farthest from the sun’, which has the same origin.  I programmed a self-rotating eye in the middle to symbolise human beings’ craving for knowledge of the universe’s deepest secrets.

The emergence phenomenon is magical but not uncommon in our daily life.  We see flocks of birds and schools of fish undertake coherent motion in groups, though made up of individual animals.  We say that the group behaviour is emergent.  Gravity might be something that arises from the pixelation of space-time.  But are we ready to unify these two seemly irreconcilable worlds?  Are we ready for this challenge?

HD video 0’58” looped