Science and technology affect us all. However, in a highly specialized society, knowledge and innovations provided by science are not always easy to grasp. Every science has its own problematics, hypotheses, world views, and vocabularies that are difficult to translate into a language that can be understood by all – which also has democratic implications. The issue of how to communicate expert knowledge to a broader public is what I deal with in my project.
In the work ”Astropark”, I developed a functional prototype of a virtual reality game that visualizes key concepts and theories within astrophysics, inparticular string theory, quantum mechanics, and celestial movements. I created a narrative and a visual language that encourage the viewer to reflect upon the big questions that astrophysics tries to answer – questions that concern us all.
The game prototype was introduced at Gothenburg Science Festival, 2019. The game is produced by Unity and Cinema 4D.
The Game is divided into 3 different scenes. From the micro scale to the macro scale, they are "Cosmic String Garden", "Schrodinger’s cat space" and "Moon and Moon observatory".
The string garden is based on the string theory. In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particlephysics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. It describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string.
It is mathematically correct but can never be proved by experiments because the limitation of technology, and that is why string theory has become a topic related to philosophy. So in the scene I created, there are many symbolic objects that represents different things in our world,the nature, the civilization and human, to question the existence and show the relationship between the origin of the world and string theory.
The Schrodinger’s cat space talked about the quantum physics and theparallel universe.
Schrödinger's cat is a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger that attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. The cat is put into a sealed box with a radioactive source, which has the possibility to kill the cat, but the time is uncertain, so in this case the cat is both dead and alive. But when one look into thebox, the uncertainty collapses and the cat is either dead or alive, and we could never see the cat in the status between both dead and alive. So in this scene I created a situation where you could see the dead and alive cat from a higher dimension without breaking the 3-dimension status.
And the Moon observatory showed the macro universe and has different stories of the moon in that scene. So as I understand astrophysics, it has so many philosophical ideas and can be generated as an artistic experience, I created my work in this way.
My exhibition was located in a cafe in Nordstan. One of the room was arranged for people to read the booklets and have Fika and discussions, and the other one was for people to play the game. There were more people than I expected coming, and I had good talks with them.
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The initial purpose of the guidebook was to distribute it to the audience at the Science Festival so that they could understand the basic concepts of my work and related astrophysical theories before or after playing the game. I think it's also a way to record my work, and as a graphic designer, it's a part of my project that I instinctively feel should be done, and I've also communicated my starting point through posters. This booklet is like a virtual tour guide, as if people can sightseeing in the game. It introduced the three different parts of Astropark: Cosmic String Garden, Schrodinger’s cat space, Moon and Moon Observatory.
