This collaborative lab is a experimental laboratory for Jiayi Young (MFA, MS Atomic Physics), and Shih-Wen Young (Ph.D. High Energy Physics) We seek to connect art, physics and math at a fundamental level, and examine how this connection is reflected in the contemporary culture. Scientific theories are not being used merely as subject matters, instead they are the reasons for which the art pieces exist. It is through these art pieces, physical laws such as fractal iteration and quantum mechanics reveal its driving force governing the organic world we live in. The projects included in this collaborative lab help define the direction of the research, which we view it as a continuous process that investigates, discovers, and revisits.

The way we view the meaning of scientific data concurs with the moral of a story physicist Richard Feynman once shared. "I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, 'Look how beautiful it is,' and I'll agree. But then he'll say, 'I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.' I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement, mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts."

Conceptual Foundation: REGULAR IRREGULARITY (R.I.)

"Irregular" refers to an apparently complex random system, and "Regular" refers to a simple equation describing the system. R.I. looks at chaotic systems in the world, compares and interprets the lived experiences with mathematical analysis of such system. It seeks to inquire the relationship between perceived virtual experiences in science and the lived experience of accepting a certain degree of chaos in our daily routine. It also blurs the border between scientific nature and its physical appearance.

This interdisciplinary research mathematically analyzes an old philosophical idea: the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions somehow governed by the laws of nature. The research searches for mathematically elegant equations describing the paring between cause and effect, particularly when the laws of nature seem random and unpredictable. In the research, our art practice creates linkage between the scientific description of randomness and its reflection in contemporary culture.  

" Chaos theory " is a study of the underlying order or similarity in a nonlinear system, which appears to exhibit random behavior and sequential relation between its current and previous states. Some examples of a random system are leaves blowing in the wind, rolling a dice and wine glass shatters on the floor. Iteration is one of the basic methods used in chaos theory simulating such a system. It is a mathematical operation that repeatedly feeds the result of an equation back into the equation itself. Another words, it continuously uses the output as its input. Therefore it is also called "successive feedback". Iteration is an important method in Chaos Theory because of the following two reasons. Firstly a minor change of the input values in the iteration process can cause dramatic fluctuation of the output results. This closely simulates a random behavior. Secondly, applying iteration method to such a system enables the modeling of its sequential behavior in which the current state of the system depends on the previous state. R.I. utilizes the iteration method to model a random system's sequential behavior, which exhibits extreme sensitivity to the input values. R.I. excavates further by developing fitting techniques suitable for predicting future events in a random system.

In this collaborative lab, we carry out a series of projects using R.I.. These projects include, "Random Marking" which examines the resemblance between lines generated by mathematical iteration method and by random mark making; "Baby NuNa" transforms sound collected near a nuclear power plant into visual patterns forming a visually chaotic representation of public perception depicting controversy associated with nuclear power plants; "GPS doodling" geographically maps an individual's daily movement, compares the movement patterns made by different individuals; and "Beijing 2008" converts Chinese calligraphy into corresponding sound and graphic patterns.