My new show opened today in the White Space Gallery, Axminster. Here's the blurb from the poster:
In Here we are Adam Nieman sets out to connect the White Space Gallery to the rest of the universe. Nieman's mathematically precise work expands our experience beyond the everyday 'human scale'. There is plenty going on beyond our local horizon, or at a finer resolution than we can perceive directly, or on a numerical scale we usually only relate to abstractly. Here we are makes this expanded scale accessible.
The centrepiece is an installation called Wall to Coast, which aims to extend the walls of the gallery all the way to the sea and beyond. Gallery space usually works as a ‘bubble’ – it is separate and cut-off from the outside world. Just for fun I wanted to do the opposite – to transform the gallery into an instrument for connecting a viewer to the rest of the world. The installation also includes equidistant azimuthal maps centred on the gallery, Google Earth imagery, photos and found objects from the four patches of coast.
Here we are being hung. In the centre are the maps from the Wall to coast installation. At the end is The air above - a map of the air above the gallery to the edge of space on the same scale as an OS map (50,000:1)
Video from one of the walls of the gallery
There are also two new versions of Allotment, which shows what we’d each get if we shared the world out fairly (which I’ve described before). It has been revised for a new population (these days we each have just 5.4 acres, not 5.7 acres) and now there is a 1:250 scale version, with 59 trees (our allotment of trees).
Allotment (1:250 scale) digital print on Dibond, metal figure, model trees 138 x 86 cmCaption: If we divided the surface of the Earth equally between its 6,871 million human inhabitants we would each have an area of land 21,663 m2 (5.4 acres). We would have approximately 59 trees each. This is our allotment, separated into areas of different land use. (To get a sense of scale, check out the figure standing on the 'Urban' patch, which is 7m x 7m.)
As ever, air features heavily in the show. I continue to try to visualise the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's something I think we should try to get a 'feel' for as well as understand numerically. I made a big picture of a tiny cube of air at sea-level pressure. The cube is 89 nanometres tall (about the size of a flu virus) and contains 17,699 air particles. The 5 blue circled particles and 2 red circled particles are carbon dioxide molecules (the others are mostly nitrogen & oxygen). Red circles indicate carbon dioxide from human activity. These few circled particles have major impact on life on Earth. Without them, all plants would die and the surface of the Earth would be frozen. Carbon dioxide is potent. The red-circled particles are changing the World’s climate. The picture is accompanied by a video (below).
392 parts per million
80cm x 60 cm Digital print on Dibond plus video (Edition of 20)
17,699 air particles. The 5 blue circled particles and 2 red circled particles are carbon dioxide molecules
The gas within
Another carbon dioxide piece, The gas within, consist of an acrylic tube divided into 2 volumes. The whole tube represents the volume of pure cabon dioxide in the air in the gallery (assuming a concentration of 392 parts per million). The larger volume (23 litres) is the 'natural' carbon dioxide - the stuff that would be there anyway. The smaller volume (9 litres) is the anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide. The dimensions of the room are 6.7 x 4.4 x 2.8 metres.
Not nothing
Another new air piece, 'Not nothing', consists only of the air in the gallery and some calculations on a couple sheets of paper. It points out "this is not an empty room - it's full of air". I worked out that there are 2,063 trillion trillion air molecules in the small volume defined by the gallery. They collide every 14 billionths of a second on average, which means there are 15 trillion trillion trillion collisions every second.
Yes - the numbers get silly and I usually try to avoid that, but I think it works in context. I tried to find some sort of handle on the numbers and chose icing sugar as a comparison. We can just about perceive icing sugar as a collection of particles rather than a continuous substance. A breath-full of air contains as many particles as there are grains of icing sugar in a cube of icing sugar 650 metres high (about 12 billion trillion).
There are other startling results from the simple calculations. For instance, the total distance travelled by the air molecules in the gallery every second is 108 trillion lightyears. That means that they cover the distance to the edge of the visible universe and back nearly 4,000 times a second. (The delightful fact that air travels huge cumulative distances was pointed out to me by my friend Ben Craven.)
London's green and pleasant land
60cm x 26cm (Edition of 20)
One of the prettiest pictures in the show is Green London. It's simply a map of London that shows only the green bits and water. For many of my pictures you have to love numbers before you can see how pretty they are, but some including Allotment (1:400) and Orbits are intrinsically pretty. I have Allotment on my bathroom wall!
Orbits
80cm x 60cm (Edition of 20)
The orbits of the planets (and Pluto) to scale
One piece that didn't make it into the show is Life Changes, which aims to mark every birth and death around the world live in real-time. I just haven't had time to make it work. I had also hoped to have a first sketch for my plan to make a portrait of everybody on Earth but, again, I haven't had enough time to experiment and there are some technical as well as visual challenges with making it work.
Digital sketch for Life Changes
There are 18 pieces that did make it into the show. Do check it out if you find yourself near East Devon. For some of my other work see: www.zangtumbtumb.com/adam
