Viscous codex

How does scientific and artistic thought connect? How do we “work” with materials in both contexts? What crosses the mind, what do we see, and what decisions do we make to move forward? And can it be done collaboratively?

In response to a call for Leonardo da Vinci-themed, fluids-centered artworks from the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics (APS DFD), my lab colleagues and I conducted a series of material and thought experiments in making images — a kind of painting, photography, or videography where the mechanics of the material plays a prominent role alongside an external thought process.

Conceptually, we were interested in the connection between impressions of fluidic motion and those of wavy or curly hair. This is a metaphor used often by da Vinci, appearing throughout his famed “codex” notebooks and in his depictions of water. These notebooks held unfinished, incomplete ideas worked through as both images and text, serving as a testament to simultaneous, at times “turbulent”, processes of observation, thought, and speculation. In our work, we considered both watery flows, where turbulence naturally occurs, and highly viscous, yield-stress flows, for which the metaphor might be more physically accurate. In viscous flows, slender fluidic threads can bend and coil, governed by laws similar to those that describe the elasticity of actual hair strands.

Our final, exhibited work eventually converged into one large-scale and several small-scale textile pieces made with coils of silicone (see Viscous Deluge), while our earlier iterations were captured in what we called the Viscous Codex.

Our process ranged from traditional techniques like paper marbling, where mixing draws out long, slender fluidic elements, to the more improvised and obscure, such as squeezing Carbopol gel through a murukku/chakli press mounted to a power drill. Our experiments were ‘frozen’ by some material process or artificially flattened by photography or videography, and then printed out. Spread out on our central meeting table like evidence, the images were then annotated by lab members in a series of quiet reflection rounds (see “Deck-Collage” for a variation on this method).