Below the surface of the seen

Author: Gránová Marie

Year of foundation: 2021

Technical University of Liberec
Faculty of Art and Architecture
Department of Art
Degree: Bachelor
Year of studies: 3

"Turbulence is the most important unresolved issue in classical physics," says Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in his world-famous and book-published lectures. He accompanies us at almost every step. In many situations, this is a welcome process. It helps, for example, when mixing two liquids or when dissolving and then homogeneously dispersing the sugar in a cup of coffee or salt in a soup, if we stir with sufficient intensity with a spoon. The more I immersed myself in this phenomenon, the more I was fascinated by how something so unique is around us all the time, but we can hardly perceive it. I thought about how to connect the two worlds, how to see the chaotic flow and at the same time stay in reality. After several attempts to achieve the breaking of two realities, I came across the principle of Schliren's representation or rather Schlieren's photography, which is a visual process that is used to photograph the flow of fluids of different densities. Unfortunately, when I managed to implement this process, an affordable mirror it could not absorb the whole picture. It caused, but a certain uniqueness, Schlieren's principle is always shown with the best technique and is displayed perfectly. It occurred to me that this may be the moment of connecting two realities. We see the imperfection of the human world and at the same time its ability to capture turbulent currents, in my case thermal. Imperfection also acts as a blur of the image or landscape (if we involve the imagination of the viewer), it shows us exactly that an unseen moment in the cross-section of image and physics, where both can be seen at once and also strikingly reminiscent of astronomical vision, which refers to the degradation of an astronomical object's image due to turbulent airflow in the Earth's atmosphere, which may be visible as blurred, flickering, or variably distorted.