Uncertain Passages

Jay Gould

I saw Gould's work in the article The Multiple Realities and Other Worlds of Art (Stephen Knudson, Dec 2013) which described his "aesthetic science experiments." The image I saw was from his Uncertain Passages series, where smoke was created in a fiberglass tube, which was removed immediately before taking the photo, creating an ethereal column of smoke in a forest clearing. I found the combination of a real, modern photo with something almost supernatural in appearance to be very interesting. On Gould's website I was further intrigued by this piece of text.

From the artist's website:

“Don’t get too near that leak. You wouldn’t want to wind up in the other universe, would you?”

Kurt Vonnegut’s repeating character Kilgore Trout took to calling mirrors “leaks,” as he believed they were a connection to another universe. While to many this might seem like typical Vonnegut absurdity, to me it has always been a reminder of the way our imaginations can run wild when presented with curiosities, and the possibility of parallel universes is one of the most provocative curiosities of all. Nearly everything that defies explanation has considered alternative universes, including déjà vu, religion, and even physics. While I have been thinking of the possibility of other worlds since I was a child, the current prominence of the “multiverse” in modern physics is what has lead me to my current fixation with the topic and serves as the backbone of this recent body of images and physical constructions.

The Uncertain Passages series explores and meditates on the unobservable reality that theoretically underpins our existence. The photographs seek to balance the exhaustion of attempting to photograph an idea that may prove not to exist with the poetic license that comes from working with currently unknowable paradoxes. I have wandered the world building and finding symbolic doorways that pass through time, space, matter and other curious phenomena so that I might embrace the unknown and welcome viewers to engage with the complex sense of wonder that defines our species. When answers are evasive, as they often are in modern science, we hold to this wonder and accept the words of Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

The fixation with "other worlds" was relatable to me as the book Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku completely changed my view on the idea, which now seems convincing and real. It's another example of how our daily experience of life is completely at odds with what we are finding to be true. To me, Gould's work brings some of this "complex sense of wonder" into a real and tangible place, beyond theories and text on a page. This is something I have wanted to do with my work, seeing what happens when we present the "unobservable reality that theoretically underpins our existence."

Wormhole

Phase 1 research

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