Frimann Kjerulf

The Ether - Installation at the Art Academy of Iceland

Simple household items: a lamp, a stove, are used here with dramatic effects to bring forward something invisible to the human eye. The simplicity is what counts in this piece.

Life is the Condition which Distinguishes Active Organisms from Inorganic Matter

In my experiment I’ve created a closed system where I’m capable of creating entities which closely reminiscent a living being. Reminding us about the fact that life is something that is very hard to define, although we have a strong feeling for what it is.

The idea is based on the physical phenomena of refraction. When light travels through a homogeneous medium (medium which is the same everywhere) it travels in a straight line, but when the medium is inhomogeneous the light will bend from it’s linear path.

A tank full of water is illuminated from two sides, and the projection of the heat gradient in the water can be seen on the adjacent walls. By pumping water from the tank through a heating mechanism and back into the tank, we introduce a temperature gradient in the water, rendering the media inhomogeneous. This change in temperature is very subtle, and unnoticeable with the bare eye. But due to the refraction of the light as it travels through the tank, we are able to see the shadowgraph of the heat pattern in the water in the projections on the walls.

The Miller- Urey Experiment was a big inspiration for this piece. The piece can be thought of as a reference to the prebiotic state of our planet 4 billion years ago. One can imagine that the cloudy background could represent the organic haze which was present in the atmosphere, while the waves on the lower part of the projection could represent the surface of the ocean.

Personally I’m mostly interested in the fact that inside the container there is nothing to be seen. Only pure liquid. But in the projection one can observe complex organic patterns and even something that looks like a living entity. For me this brings forward the most aesthetical part of science; Bringing into light something which we are not capable of observing with our own eyes.

In Phase

Vibrating string and fluorescent light

Since this is a very minimalistic piece it is absolutely necessary that the final installation will be as precisely built as possible. So I find in nessesary to point that this piece is a scetch. The object in the middle is a string which rotates, the speed of the rotation can be controlled by the voltage controller seen on the floor. Standing waves are observed, which are the states of the lowest energy for a given rotational frequency. More interesting was though when the string would take on an abstract form and change shape periodically, in a very organic way. Based on the fact that this behavior was periodic it is likely that the observed state is a linear combination of many modes. These linear combinations were impossible to record on video, due to the low frames per second count on modern cameras.

The piece is mounted inside a wall with fluorescent lighting behind. The fluorescent light blinks at around 50hz. The color spectrum of the light is not uniform over one period which results in a blue and red cast on the vibrating string when it’s rotating at a speed which is approximately an integer multiple of the lights frequency.