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installations > Im Gang der RaumZeit / Walking through Einstein's Space-Time
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Im Gang der RaumZeit /
Walking through Einstein's
Space-Time

2015

Interactive, audio-visual text installation
with wireless headphone, video projection, laser sensor, computer


Voice: Johannes Wilms
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Barely anyone knows it well: the formula that set our imagination of the world and the whole universe on it's head a hundred years ago. On the 25th of November, 1915 Albert Einstein published the results of his General Theory of Relativity. This founded a completely new view of the relationship between space and time, summarized in his famous (but difficult to interpret) field equations, including the prediction of "black holes" as well as "gravitation waves", which exactly 100 years later have been experimentally proved (found in Sept. 2015, published in Feb. 2016).

The formula that turned our old Newtonian preconception of the cosmos on its head, and that still includes almost unimaginable consequences in relation to space and time, is the main point of the audio-visual, interactive installation "Im Gang der RaumZeit / Walking through Einstein's Space-Time".
On a 'text line' laid in the room (marked as a yellow double-line) a visitor can wander through the formula, while making it hearable and visible to themself, dependent on their position and movement along the line of text. A laser beam measures the current position of the visitor on the line which calls up the appropriate sequence from the 'field equation' (acoustically over headphones and visually as a projection) through a computer program.

Conception - Relativity - Experiment

The installation conceptionalizes the field equations in an aesthetic way and makes the formula literally "accessible". As simple as the movement through the space/time through the formula seems, the experiential awareness is correspondingly complexly formed which is hidden in this process: Time will be transposed to space and space into time, and in nuce the visitor is walking through Space-Time.
The visitor undertakes a foundational experience of relativity while it depends on them what they perceive: the observer changes through observing the observed. Simultaneously the visitor is part of a "physical experiment", measured like gravity waves just as the LIGO-telescope does with a laser - and if they, like a "mass particle" in the universe, wander through the room on the line, they cause themselves to be as moving mass that in fact is a warping of space/time, even if it's only a minimally small one, that emits a still immeasurably small gravitation wave...
Leibniz-Universität Hannover
Lichthof
Day of Relativity

Nov. 25th 2015
at
100. Anniversary of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity




Producer
Hermannshof Völksen

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