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Image of a large machine with diagrams illustrating stages: drawing, painting, digital composite

High Energy Physics and Experimental Seeing: Compound Pictures

Steven J Oscherwitz

The concept of a Compound Picture, first published in a Leonardo artist's statement entitled Art /Technoscience Engages Cancer in The Leonardo Journal MIT Press from 2005, helps articulate this scholarly synthesis.

This presentation proposes a virtual and empirical contemporary hybrid synthesis of art engaging HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS by way of the concept of Compound Pictures. In contrast to traditional pictorial representations of science and art that alienate and isolate each other's disciplines. Compound pictures intertwine and juxtapose an assembly of images from science and art to both virtually and potentially empirically engage the new cutting-edge High ENERGY Physics of the femtosecond free-electron laser at SLAC'S Linear Accelerator at Stanford University.

First, in this presentation, this Compound picture presents a virtual Experimental Visual Schema consisting of an assembly of images borrowed from the contexts of experimental science and art. These images, when juxtaposed together, form visualizations and suggested semiotic contexts that can engage, challenge, and ultimately transform the very meaning of these images in our thinking in order to empower interactions between science and art.

Second, the e!ect of this pictorial oscillation serves as a philosophical pivot that helps reconceive how art can have a direct impact on empirical science; While empirically demonstrated by a drawing, a painting, and a digital composition inserted and juxtaposed within the laser's optical system of mirrors.

Once visualized, it suggests and potentially exhibits how these instruments engineered junctures path of an extremely short lasered pulse of High ENERGY, can be engaged by aesthetic experience exemplified by the inserted art.

We are ultimately reconceiving how a new frontier of aesthetic engagement armed with the Theoretics of a Compound Picture can impact High ENERGY Physics empirical investigations of the observation and study of the geometries of electronic states of our most fundamental atomic structures. Thus, this aesthetic, cognitive, and semiotic visual schematics of a compound picture can help reconceive through the technology of the femtosecond freeelectron laser, an aesthetically empowered and experimental display of a new tailored form of ENERGY. This ENERGY could ultimately examine an array of kinematic molecular chemical reactions, yet seen through literally a new seeing of experimental light.