Elastic Universe
Voebe de Gruyter meets Robbert Dijkgraaf

'The artist Voebe de Gruyter is interested in the behaviour of elementary particles, thus entering intuitively on the terrain of Robbert Dijkgraaf, Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Amsterdam. Dijkgraaf was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 2003 and is an internationally renowned mathematical physicist. Both of them work mainly with hypotheses and are constantly looking for ways of making the abstract world of their study visible.'
(Maria Barnas)

It is a mild Spring evening. The man walking beside me says, 'I am waiting for the hill.' I could add that the city was dark and he was a big fellow, but if I do not provide the man and the sentence with a more detailed context, they remain blurred and vague against the background of a murky street. What in fact is a mild evening?
Warmth is a relative notion. Thousand of light particles vibrate and when they do so with sufficient force, they generate an impression of warmth. But a single light particle on its own has nothing to do with temperature. It is neither warm nor cold. All the qualities we attribute to matter are a result of the way that we describe the behaviour of the most elementary particles. There is the surface layer, the outward appearance of things. You can try and grasp this level by describing it in words. But there will always be something you haven't described with enough detail and precision, and there will always be an association that you didn't allow for sufficiently for your meaning to crystallize completely. And the more you go into things, the more you zoom in on the details, the vaguer are the contours of the whole that the minute particles form part of. Thus the notion of a particle by itself, like the statement 'I am waiting for the hill', only gives rise to evocative images.
Take a closer look. At the end of the street is a slope leading to a bridge. It resembles a hill. The man walking next to me is holding a bike. His girl friend, who is keen to hop on the back behind him has asked, 'Why don't you get on your bike?' We are slowly approaching the hill. It is a mild Spring evening. The man says, 'I am waiting for the hill.'

Recognizing Patterns

Our understanding of our surroundings requires coherence - a frame within which we can understand the world. Our senses are focused on it, and our perceptions are constantly in search of patterns we can recognize. Anyone however who goes deeper into something and pays careful attention to its specific features will see its surroundings blurring in the corners of his eyes. The outside layer of reality disintegrates literally before your eyes. It splits itself up and is at the same time indivisible because it cannot be captured.
On this subject the physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf says, 'I think that space as we experience it is an illusion. Reality as it appears to us is only a wafer-thin layer of the total reality. I cannot imagine that the world as we now see it is a reflection of the world at the smallest scale. As such this is a question of speculation, but I suspect that, when reduced to the smallest scale, the world is composed of ones and zeroes. And what we experience as space and time exists solely in our own human scale.' Voebe de Gruyter does not only study the ideas formulated by scientists like Dijkgraaf; she attributes characteristics to them that she derives from human behaviour. She is continually preoccupied with pointing out patterns, both in human behaviour and at a more elementary level, in as far as it is visible. She suspects the existence of a world lying behind or under the superficial visible structures and explores her hypotheses in photos, drawings, texts and videos. Her work is in fact a great recording machine that reveals and analyses those domains that attract her curiosity.
In The Chewing Gum Drawings of 1994 for instance she studied her notion that information can penetrate small particles. She imagined that the sentences people spoke when they were chewing gum ended up in the gum. Figuratively speaking, but also physically, words are composed of sound and sound is composed of vibrations. Vibrations, according to De Gruyter, can actually linger somewhere. When someone on the street spits out his gum, a strong sense of longing for someone can also end up on the street next to a song - all of a sudden, in a cast-off piece of chewing gum.
De Gruyter used her finger nails to scratch the chewing gum very carefully from the ground and proceeded to stick it on graph paper. The gum lies now surrounded by a 'text-cloud' on an ordinary piece of paper. One cloud belongs to a Turkish passer-by, another to a cyclist listening to British pop songs on a walkman and singing along with them. The clouds remind one of the lobes of the brain, but also of blots. They are indefinite shapes that take on meaning when they come in contact with each other. The result is a partial collection of fields that would normally never meet but which even overlap in this work. It is this overlapping area that is the most exciting from the point of view of narrative technique. This is because, although the conditions and narrative elements have been shaped by De Gruyter, she does not know in advance how it will end up. The meeting of the stories has an unpredictable result. And even on the piece of paper the visual stories are not brought to any conclusion because, no matter how carefully they are formulated, they are primarily mental. After all, you do not really enter the story yourself when you literally want to read it on paper. It is primarily a story that takes place in your own mind. And it stands or falls by your willingness to let it appeal to your imagination.

Strings and Cables

In the work Laying an Egg in a Stranger's Neck (2000) that she made during a stay in New York, De Gruy­ter again creates a force-field for the thoughts of the viewer with specific conditions. She comes up with the possibility that you squeeze your attention into a tight ball by concentrating hard on someone and you can then lay this attention like a small perfectly-formed object in his neck. What the egg will be like, De Gruyter does not say. You have to imagine it yourself. For her it evidently has to do with the mechanism, the (mental) visualization of a possible transmission of information via particles that we can't see with the naked eye.
During her stay in New York she worked in a studio that was part of a deep loft full of similar studios. De Gruyter imagined that the rooms were not separated hermetically but that the particles of information composed of the thoughts, ideas and maybe even the despair that artists feel about a work they are unable to resolve can travel through the walls and end up in the next-door room. And although she made drawings, in a detailed model to illustrate her vision, the work according to De Gruyter does not consist of how she pictures it but of the fact that artists and artworks influence each other; that works can come about that look like each other even if there are walls separating them. Later on she found confirmation for her ideas in string theory, the theory about the smallest particles that forms part of modern physics, by which according to scientists all physical phenomena can be explained.
For a long time modern physics consisted of two irreconcilable principles - Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity on the one hand and quantum mechanics on the other. Relativity theory investigates the cosmos on the largest possible scale, while quantum mechanics focuses on the opposite - the very smallest elements in matter, including sub-atomic particles. These theories formed the basis for the enormous advances made in physics over the past century and they helped us acquire an understanding of the expanding universe and the internal structure of the elementary particles. The two theories however were mutually irreconcilable. String theory that operates not with the components of atoms such as electrons and quarks but with tiny 'rubber bands' that can vibrate in a variety of ways brought about a change. In this theory the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics even need each other for it to make sense. It offers a unified framework with which the smallest and the largest components can be studied.
Voebe De Gruyter: 'Staring at the ground was the basis for my "cable theory". Staring is a sort of non-active looking; I imagined office personnel spending a lot of time looking at the ground so that they can be somewhere else in their thoughts. Instead of taking them to the Bahamas I led them via the cables to the world of strings. The idea is that the Planck scale (used to chart the movement of the smallest particles) begins under the table, making it possible to study even the ultra-small. Offices provide good situations for exploring these cables. I imagine people in offices getting totally bored. If they have any knowledge of string theory they can descend into the space beneath their tables. On the tables there is the World Wide Web; below them is the world of strings. We sit there with our own reality like a clumsy layer in between.'
She took photos in offices of floors and of the area under people's desks. There she discovered a universe of cables and leads that she proceeded to expose to ideas from string theory. She used a pencil to draw her ideas on the photos, prolonging a cable for instance in a scientific illustration of a string. She wrote in pencil on one of the photos on a wooden floor, 'both expanded and rolled-up space'. What happens here is strange - Planck's scale is equated with the human scale. This leads to a strange 'crease' in one's perception - a distortion due to knowledge that does not conform to what you see in front of you.

Spidery drawings as a solution

In this way De Gruyter's cable theory makes abstract thought almost palpable - something that a physicist might have difficulty accepting. After all, how do you present your ideas and hypotheses exclusively in an abstract, mathematical world?
Robbert Dijkgraaf: 'It is hard to depict ideas about abstract mathematics. A mistake that many scientists make is to underestimate people's imaginations. They work out everything in great detail for a computer image, but this illustration lacks the ambiguity the original idea probably had. It is sometimes more pleasant to keep an image in your mind rather than putting it on a computer screen, which can destroy something irreparably. Mental images are much stronger and they still preserve this ambiguity and remain open-ended. As in a dream. Knowledge is a wide landscape that is veiled in mist. You see a few of the summits and you try and fill in the rest, while being unable to sketch it in detail. Science tries to acquire an intuitive idea of areas where by definition you really don't have any intuitive ideas at your disposal. You can develop them. And these computer animations of strings for instance are in fact our extremely clumsy human way of developing an intuitive grasp of a world that by definition is not composed of images. You cannot take as much as a photo of the minutest particles. Sometimes you see scientists making a tiny spidery drawing to illustrate an idea. This clumsy little sketch works excellently because in its clumsiness it doesn't just communicate by saying "this is an illustration" but also "it is an attempt at one ".'
The open character of Dijkgraaf's 'spidery drawings' - this is exactly what Voebe de Gruyter's images consist of. They are sketches, primi pensieri, as the Old Italian masters called sketches, that reveal the most intimate mental processes of the maker and that preserve a high potential for filling in. It is literally and figuratively an exemplary world that De Gruyter presents - a world that precedes the images. They are examples of disquieting suspicions and interim stages of a broader ongoing study that is in fact only vaguely based on science. The scientific models she studies are rather to be used to provide material and a formal idiom for intuitive hypotheses, rather than to seek any functional relationship with hard science.
When you realize that the work of Voebe de Gruyter is exemplary, it comes as no surprise that she has a problem with presenting it. It is difficult to make a presentation of something that is constantly in progress. Nonetheless, she still thinks it important to make exhibitions, regarding it as part of the process of creation. 'Exhibitions have never been an end point for me. In an exhibition I plant my work in an experimental garden and then I observe what the world does with it. It is not just people who respond to it, but also images and events. For me they have an equal status. This is beautiful because it makes the work more generously present in the world. This mechanism operates not only in my work; I also see it very clearly in that of others.'
The work of Voebe de Gruyter is never finished. It exists simultaneously and in different stages of development. It exists in the physical space, that -- even if we call it an illusion -- is the most real we have at our disposal, and it exists on paper, and only comes to life in the mind of the viewer. This multiple presence looks suspiciously like a string, which is a single object but which can take on different forms. The laws and rules that De Gruyter formulates reverberate like strings with the environment and the perceptions of the artist and, not in the last instance, with the inner images of the viewer. Do we learn as a result to be in closer touch with reality? Maybe. It is more probable however that whatever layer of reality we enter on, a new universe opens up if we ask the right questions. Voebe de Gruyter asks these questions and offers provisional conclusions. They vibrate. And they are about to change direction.
(METROPOLIS M 2004 / no.2)