Why AxS Episode 3
Dark Matter: Tiny Humans, Vast Universe
Ready to go dark and get deep? In the third episode of the Why AxS podcast—where brilliant scientific and artistic minds ponder the important whys—we explore the infinite possibilities of the origins and nature of our universe.
Our guests couldn't be more disparate in their paths, yet conjoined in their pursuits.
Lita Albuquerque, an internationally renowned visual artist and ArtCenter faculty member, is inspired by the natural world, on this planet and beyond. Her works are intimate and epic, earthly and ephemeral—a celebration of how we connect to our environment, below and above.
Her large-scale installations—like Rock and Pigment, a series of rocks in the Mojave Desert in alignment to the stars overhead—connect human to celestial bodies, allowing us to feel what our minds can’t comprehend—that we’re a tiny speck suspended among billions of galaxies.
Dida Markovic, an astrophysicist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also studies the incomprehensible, specifically the dark sector of the universe.
Dark energy and dark matter govern 95% of all the gravitational interactions in the universe–yet, present a mystery to science.
I am so enthralled that we are this object in space, literally surrounded by stars. We're in a galaxy surrounded by billions of galaxies, and I'm interested in bringing that awareness to the body.
Lita Albuquerque
I was interested in the field of cosmology, and this is how the universe began, how it's evolving, what it is made of. And dark energy is inherently a part of that.
Dida Markovic
Like Albuquerque, Markovic had an early interest in outer space–specifically cosmology, or the study of the origins of the universe.
We know the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, but the cause for that acceleration is unknown. Scientists define this unknown as dark energy. An aspect of Markovic’s research includes sending telescopes into space to map galaxies—the farther the better, as the longer light travels the further you can look into the past.
There are countless questions that we as humans have asked ourselves for millennia: Why are we here? Why does the universe exist? How did it begin? What are the laws that are governing it?
Throughout this potent conversation, Markovic and Albuquerque complement each other in offering the scientific and artistic approaches to try to answer these questions. In other words, they’re about to blow your mind.
Why AxS
Join us for ArtCenter’s new mini-series investigating the powers of art and science–and the extraordinary, unexpected outcomes when the two fields intersect.
