Event Horizon Instrument – Beyond Boundaries

2024

Kinetic light installation

Technique: LED, microcontroller, motor, metal structure, liquid

Dimensions: 1m x 1m x 0.8m

Currently on display at Light Art Museum Budapest

The installation titled "Mapping the Boundaries" is the first piece in the Event Horizon Experiment series. These works focus on the event horizon as an astrophysical phenomenon. This installation evokes the aesthetics of specialized tools created for scientific experiments. Similarly prototyped through experimentation, the device serves as a functional tool for generating a light phenomenon projected onto the ceiling.

The event horizon is a boundary beyond which no signals can reach the observer, and light rays initiated behind it can never cross its boundary. Those passing through it cannot return from the observer's side either. Thus, there are spaces within the fabric of the Universe that cannot be directly known or experienced. Even if we could look at such a boundary closely, we would still not comprehend the singularity behind it; the event horizon would never reveal it to us, and it can only take shape in our imagination.

Strangely, we may get closest to understanding the incomprehensible conditions beyond the event horizon when we let our subconscious run free and allow this phenomenon—far beyond our everyday experience—to take its place. The installation explores the event horizon as a boundary surface, as well as the unchartable space behind it, the singularity where spacetime curvature reaches infinity. The structure generates a force through its rotation, bending the surface of the liquid within. Consequently, not only does it curve the liquid’s surface, but it also gradually deflects the light rays arriving from above. The structure speeds itself up during repeated movement phases until the reflected light focuses into a single spot, evoking the accretion disk around a black hole. In this way, this continuously changing optical system repeatedly attempts to evoke the singularity hidden behind the curved surface of the event horizon.

Exhibited:

• Phatnom Vision, Light Art Museum Budapest