slaw leonora: Exploring oscillation proves a moving experience

Claire O'Connell, contributor

"What?s an oscillator?? asks a woman out loud. She?s walking by a queue outside the preview of Oscillator: Everything in motion, a new exhibition at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. It?s a reasonable question.

A quick scan of the gallery?s primer explains that ?anything that vibrates, follows cycles or has a repeating [pattern] is an oscillator?, and that the exhibition ?explores the movements, vibrations and cycles all around us?.

Sure enough, inside we are instantly immersed in a riot of noise and movement. Just a few steps from the door, visitors are already playing with a giant Newton?s cradle suspended from the ceiling and twirling large discs, entitled Cradle - Euler?s Disk - Rattleback: Demonstrations of non-trivial motion, by Trinity College Dublin physicist and artist Stefan Hutzler, to see what happens.

(Images: Science Gallery)

Upstairs, people are milling around a length of rope of that creates waves and responds to the movements of observers, called Waves by Daniel Palacios (see video at top). Others are climbing into a large, foam-lined pod, an artwork entitled Mouth Tank by Michael Hanna that generates phonetic sounds (photo above).

?It?s a wonderful blend of art and physics, and I think this is a show that will find people?s inner geek,? says Michael John Gorman, director of the university's Science Gallery, the exhibition venue. He is curating Oscillator with Hutzler and Douglas Repetto, a New York-based artist and director of research at the city's Columbia University Computer Music Center.

?We are always trying to distinguish oscillation from noise, and a lot of science is based on finding the cycle, finding the periodicity, looking for patterns,? says Gorman. ?And for me there?s a fundamental thing about how we interpret the world as humans - we look for oscillation, and that is how we decide whether there?s something we can engage with.?

He admits that he did some head-scratching initially about how an exhibition built around such a theme might work. ?The interesting thing is where does it stop? What isn?t oscillation? You find oscillations in all sorts of places, from economic boom-and-bust cycles to weather systems, and all music is fundamentally oscillation,? he says.

In the end, he describes what resulted as a sensory experience: ?It?s visually exciting, parts of it are really immersive,? he say, gesturing to the mouth-simulating tank, ?and parts of it are acoustically deafening.?

Indeed, many of the installations are entrancing, such as the almost ceiling-to-floor hanging pendulums of Phase Ring by Andrew Cavatorta. Each one bears a string, and a mounted plectrum plucks it as the pendulum swings back and forth.

Then there is Equilibrium Variant by Roberto Pugliese, consisting of two robot arms, one bearing a microphone and the other a speaker. The resulting feedback prompts the arms to move like fighting or courting animals sizing each other up.

Other exhibits are more unsettling. I found it a little disorienting to stay in a room of pulsing light and sound called Telephone Rewired by Sean Montgomery and art duo LoVid. Interestingly, visitors are asked to carry out computer-based tasks to see how they perform under these conditions.

But the show-stopper is the reanimation of two pig hearts - taken from animals that were slaughtered for meat anyway, we are assured. The hearts are ushered in through the crowd, taken off ice and placed into a rig, where artist Helen Pynor and cardiac physiologist Michael Shattock busy themselves to get them pumping again.

The point of the exhibit, entitled The Body is a Big Place, is to explore ideas related to organ transplantation, explains Pynor.

More generally, oscillation can provide a lens to look at the world, says Repetto. ?Anywhere you look, anything you look at, at some level it is part of a system, it?s part of a cycle,? he says. ?And some of the talks will get more into the question of when are these patterns real, when are they innate, when have we created them and when have we just imagined them?"

Oscillator runs until 14 April at the Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.