By: Bernice Abbot.
At: MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA.
A black canvas. Twenty-six white images of spheres. What is this?
Look closer. Fifteen large balls, each with a dark stripe. Eleven small balls, each with a black dot.
They are separated—not by a line down the middle, but by a line from the lower left-hand corner to about the midpoint of the top edge.
“If the balls were connected, they would form four lines in the shape of an “x”…like a
chromosome containing two chromatids.”
Where are the spheres on the page? If the balls were connected, they would form four lines in the shape of an “x”—not the symmetric “x” of the Latin alphabet, but more like a chromosome containing two chromatids. The two lines of small balls meet at a 90° angle. The first is a horizontal line starting from the right side of the page, 1/3 down from the top. The other “chromatid” line starts 1/3 up the page from the bottom; it is almost vertical, pointing slightly towards the lower left-hand corner. The two lines of large balls meet at the same point where the two lines of small balls meet. One of the lines of large balls starts at the middle of the top edge, and the other line starts from the point of intersection, moving to the lower left-hand corner.
Look even closer. On each large ball, the stripe points in a different direction. First it points to the left. On the next ball, it continues to point to the left. After the 5th ball, though, the stripe begins pointing downward, until the last large ball’s black stripe is vertical. Is the ball rotating?
What about the small ball? A black dot moves from sphere to sphere. The dot starts in the lower right-hand corner, moving to the upper left-hand corner for the 4th ball. After that ball, the dots stay fixed at the upper left-hand corner, as if the ball has stopped rotating.
Abstract art. Shapes and designs on a surface. How can one find meaning in such a piece?
It helps if the viewer knows physics. Why? Because the picture of white spheres on a black background is actually an image of momentum: a work of art demonstrating mivi=mfvf.
A ball drops with gravity. Another ball is shot at the first ball. A collision occurs. The balls fall.
Do this experiment right now, and you will see two balls hit the ground, almost instantaneously, with the sound of two thuds.
Slow down time.
Watch the ball fall like a boy climbing down a ladder. He is on the top rung. He steps down to the next rung, then one lower, until he lifts his foot off the bottom rung.
The balls act like two children at a playground. They are on the jungle gym moving towards each other. Bam! Suddenly the two children clonk heads as they grab the same rung. They fall. What if you could see the balls’ movements the way you saw the children grab each individual bar?
Stroboscope. That is the answer.
Imagine you are at a party. The strobe lights are on. You see the dancers move like robots. A slight movement. Then another. And another. The flipbook-like images come to life to describe motion. Your eyes are not seeing everything, but you extrapolate the images into live action video.
“The flipbook-like images come to life to describe motion.”
The stroboscope is a camera. Its shudders stay open as it releases short bursts of high-energy light. It happens much faster than the speed at which a normal camera can open and close its shudders.
To use the stroboscope, the balls are placed in a dark room. The short light pulses capture positions of the balls at different moments all on one page.
1st flash. The large ball is at the top. The small ball is on the right. The large ball is moving down, and the small ball is moving to the left.
2nd flash. They move a little closer together, with the large ball moving down and the small ball moving to the left.
3rd flash. More movement. 4th flash. 5th flash. Bang! The collision has occurred. Now, though, it can be seen. Before it seemed instantaneous.
6th flash. Something has changed. The large ball is not going straight down. Instead it gets a little closer to the left and bottom with each flash. The small ball no longer moves just to the left. It is moving almost straight down with only a little leftward motion. The distance between each ball halves after the collision. The balls are moving more slowly in their new directions.
The stationary image shows distinct motion. This photo is an archive of a series of events that happened in less than a second.