Light Pushers
I live in Vermont. Years ago I was swimming in an abandoned quarry, and as I was clambering out, my foot brushed against something that wasn't a rock or a stick or weeds. I fished around and pulled out a bowl-shaped metal object covered in the green slime of time underwater. Once home, I rinsed and scrubbed the debris off the surfaces to discover a low conical-shaped disc of metal with attached balls or knobs. The metal was fantastically thin and yet stiff and had a finish coloration that made no sense. From one angle, it is blue, from another green and, when resting on a table top, from across the room, it is violet. There were also subtle markings etched into the surface. I was younger with a family and put the bowl in a box in the basement. Recently I moved; the kids are grown up. And I pulled this thing out of the box...
I took it to an archeology professor at Middlebury College who said it could be old but doesn't match any cultural artifacts she knows of. She sent me to a friend in the physics department who sent me to a colleague at MIT who is a physical materials scientist, which yielded speculation about composition -- metallic, but no specific matches with known alloys, possibly an allotrope in a crystalline phase, but nothing he had ever seen before. Conclusions: phenomenal strength and stiffness, ultra-light weight, unknown surface finish that appears to be the material itself as opposed to some plated or painted coating. As I was leaving, he confessed to never encountering an object like this in his lab in forty years of research, and we should be open to the possibility that it is not of terrestrial origin.
I went back to the quarry as soon as the ice melted off with a mask and snorkel after doing some homework on the quarry. It is hundreds of feet deep and hasn't been in operation for 177 years. In two afternoons of holding my breath for all I could stand, I found nine more "plates." The largest was the deepest and I was only around fifteen feet down. After cleaning, I found they were all different in "finishes" but fall into four sizes, so far. One is cut into as though damaged in a fire, but the others are nearly pristine, no denting, no corrosion. They defy explanation as to purpose. One feels like a map. One a color photograph of a deep space nebula. One a device or part of a device like a microfiche or memory storage. The sense of them to me is possibly something to do with navigation, but a couple seem to be imaging atomic structure or energy fields. They also have a sense of time, though this could be my personal reaction to their presence. I am going back with a diver thanks to a grant from NEMOCA, the New England Museum of Contemporary Art. Scientific academia, at this point, is not interested in funding research into inexplicable artifacts. We are cataloging, numbering and photographing each of these objects for a comprehensive documentation of this project we are calling "Cosmic Debris." The objects are offered for sale after our measurements and imaging to help fund future research. We will publish a book on the data and photographs.
OR
Bowls of Light
What you are looking at are sculptures made of 99.9% pure titanium, brass and stainless steel with a dash of chrome plating, but the essence of the object, the heart of the art, is light. The colors on the surface of the titanium are created by wavelength interference. With a torch, or voltage in an electrolytic bath, I form a layer of a clear oxide on the surface of the metal that is 30 to 55 nanometers thick or roughly .0000016 inches thick. Light bounces off the surface of the clear oxide layer and light bounces off the surface of the metal and this millionths of an inch differential creates a spectrum of color depending on the thickness of the film. There is no pigment or paint or dye. The color is pure light. Paint produces color through the absorption of particular frequencies. What you are seeing is exactly the same as the spectral color of a blue Morphos butterfly's wings or a soap bubble, the iridescence of a hummingbird's livery or the liquid spectrum of an oil film on wet pavement. The low cone shape of the bowl is designed to make this microscopic film generate a shifting range of different colors depending where the viewer stands. This bowl of light can appear blue or green or violet all at once. Or pink and yellow or gold or silver. The fierce purple overlaid on an electric yellow is purely light manipulation. This is physics at work. And our eyes, in all their miraculous functioning, struggle to make sense of what you are seeing. Photographs are pale shadows of the experience itself. If you could see this object in a darkened room it would be gray. These sculptures make the ephemeral permanent. The sculpture is not the piece of metal.
We have named this project "Cosmic Debris" and each sculpture is numbered, photographed and will be documented thoroughly with a book. They are all one of a kind. They are physically impossible to reproduce. Like you.
Bowls exist to hold "things." These bowls exist to push light.
If one were to "push light," would that make it go a tiny bit faster? Faster than light, so backwards in time. Stay tuned. I will get back to you yesterday.
Peace and Love,
Truth is Beauty is Magic,
B mac
P.S. Be aware that what you are looking at is the only one you will ever, ever see like it.
P.P.S. Each bowl comes with a wall hanger that permits one to show either side of the cone.
