title: Kinesthesia, 2001
materials: surfactant, helium, bubble generator, directed lighting
description: Installation of neutrally buoyant trajectory bubbles in elevator.

Brochure for Kinesthesia at The Queens Museum of Art
Left image: Variations of the trajectory of material as it moves through atmospheric turbulence with eddies of various sizes. From Aerobiology: The Ecological Systems Approach, ed. Robert L. Edmonds (New York: Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc., 1978). Used with permission.

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The obvious becomes the miraculous when the invisible is made visible. Susan Wolsborn is interested in air as an operative medium to comprehend the conception of the world we live in. Air is an elusive entity and an imprecise notion in our everyday environment simply because of its invisible and omnipresent nature-air infiltrates, adulterates, merges, and crosses boundaries. As Wolsborn states:

Air has its own traffic. It enters lungs, buildings, subway tunnels, and jet engines alike. It is strained through filters in 'clean rooms,' fed through turbines to create airlocks, and exposed to wounds to kill aerobic bacteria. It ferries and flows, isolates and combines

Wolsborn's ambitious project Kinesthesia attempts to portray both humans and their environment as mutually responsive agents and therefore both as equal components of the material world. The term Kinesthesia refers to experiences that arise during movement from sense organs in the membranes lining the joints and from the sense of effort in voluntary movement. In short, the artist applies the same principle beyond the confine of a human body by regarding the world as a united organism where the individual body is a mere particle of the whole.

The artist's move to New York in 1997 sensitized her to the teeming energy of the urban environment: its astonishing density of people and their material surroundings, and the city space embracing the overwhelming circulation of electric energy. Art and science echo and resonate in an inquisitive mind. Driven by the impulse "to see" in order "to know," Wolsborn goes out of her way tapping into the realm of biology and physics. She does so by way of making it optically evident, just as science often reaches for the visible, which is so powerful as an explanatory strategy that it commands an acceptance.

Wolsborn's idea of visualizing the airflow is not only to chart kinetic forces, but also to investigate the interaction that takes place between human movements and the atmosphere. Inspired by the concept of an apparatus from particle physics known as "cloud chamber" (a gas-filled device in which the path of charged subatomic particles can be detected by the formation of chains of droplets on ions generated by their passage), Wolsborn employs a machine to generate small, neutrally buoyant bubbles (approximately 1/8 inch in diameter) to fill the elevator of the Museum. The elevator, designed to accommodate 166 passengers (25,000 lb.), is an unusually spacious one. Once just a mere void, the oversize elevator interior turns into a field where cosmic energy manifests itself in a lyrical constellation of the fantastic bubbles. Under the directed lighting, the bubbles perform to trace the movements occurring in the space. As the doors open and close, and as passengers enter and exit, the bubbles reciprocate and broadcast the interchange among the moving agents. Presented now as an optical phenomenon, the air connects us to our immediate surrounding that is previously rarely grasped as tangible reality.

Representation of models of the universe has been one of the major preoccupations in the history of art. From Leonardo da Vinci's obsessive studies of the atmosphere and other natural phenomena to Impressionism, from Constructivism to kinetic art, not to mention the encyclopedic array of approaches in abstract art, artists of all ages have aspired long and hard for visual interpretation of the invisible. They all have searched ways to encompass the realms of the material and the immaterial in order to grasp the universe we live in and to know who we are. Russian avant-garde's eccentric Pavel Filonov (1883-1941), for instance, painted in a style developed from fusion between analytical Cubism and Futurism. He constructed images with disintegrating bodies and space until they are nearly indistinguishable, in the way nature creates larger constructions. Yves Kline (1928-1962) attempted to capture wind patterns by strapping a wet canvas to the roof of his car driven from Paris to Nice in his Cosmogonies series in the 1960s.

Between macrocosm and microcosm, artists investigate the perennial relationship between humans and the universe. At once scientific and poetic, Wolsborn's Kinesthesia reveals one's familiar living unit as a part of the vast universe in a continuous state of flux. It brings the "out there" to the "in here." It suddenly blurs the boundary between the imaginary and the real. As William Blake puts it: "The imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence Itself."

Hitomi Iwasaki
Associate Curator