Award-winning director Thomas Riedelsheimer works with light. It is his medium. Mysterious and beguiling. In this film, in remote island settings and hi-tech laboratories, he brings together art and science to find the sweet spot between knowledge and beauty.
For Albert Einstein, mystery was the origin of science and art. His work and, simultaneously, Pablo Picasso’s art, fundamentally changed our understanding of the world.
In Tracing Light, science and art come together to illuminate the mysteries of light. The film brings together physicists and artists from Scotland’s Outer Hebrides to the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light, Germany, in a quest to understand and to animate light. At the University of Glasgow, the artist duo Semiconductor works with single-photon avalanche diode cameras, aka SPAD, to film the propagation of light in space.
Julie Brook, one of a handful of female land artists, takes us on her search for light and colour to Scotland’s remote west and the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy. Fire, the eruption of stored sunlight, is close to her heart.
At the Max Planck Institute, the artists Brunner/Ritz regard the rotunda – a glass roof and white, towering walls – and the light changing through the day. Confronted by its inscrutable properties, they ask: What is the opposite of light?
Thomas Riedelsheimer finds the sweet spot between knowledge and beauty.
Fred Frith and Gabby fluke-mogul soundtrack.
This event will last approximately 90 minutes without an interval. Please join us for a Q&A afterwards with Julie Brook and Dr James Fox
Continue the conversation around art and the natural world at Celebrating the Earth with Rachel Portman, Julie Brook and Nick Drake. Explore parallel responses to place in Different Worlds at Pangolin London, housed in the same building as Kings Place.
