Light accelerator

BACKGROUND The Wonderland show featured contemporary Australian artists working at the forefront of digital media, and was the first exhibition of its kind in Taiwan. It was also the inaugural exhibition in the brand new Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei. The exhibition had more than 50,000 visitors and attracted media across North Asia and Australia. This work in one of a series developed during my 2010 Synapse research residency at the Australian Synchrotron. Also shown from the series was Lightcurve. CONTRIBUTION Light accelerator is a visualisation of the unvisualisable energy beam that is the heart of the Australian Synchrotron. The work has been created solely with light that has been opto-digitally collected from the Synchrotron, and has used a process methodogically analogous to those used by the Synchrotron scientists. The difference in this research output is that Henschke is not seeking to illustrate specifics, he instead questions the nature and limits of art and scientific visualisation. This project is innovative in the way he heuristically developed a method of 'visual data manipulation' that is a kind of visual Fourier Transform, a mathematical process scientists use to translate spatial data into frequency data and vice versa. SIGNIFICANCE This series is unique in that nobody else had been privileged to a hands-on art residency at a particle accelerator. A similar Collide at CERN Residency Program commenced in 2011 and was itself developed after their arts officer Ariane Koek conducted a study of Henschke's work. Synapse is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, and the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT).