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Clarkson professor featured at Digital Arts Community of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group panel

Posted 9/7/16

Clarkson University Assistant Professor Alex Lee's animation “Fractals, Particles, Photos, Microwaves” was featured at a Digital Arts Community of the Association for Computing Machinery's …

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Clarkson professor featured at Digital Arts Community of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group panel

Posted

Clarkson University Assistant Professor Alex Lee's animation “Fractals, Particles, Photos, Microwaves” was featured at a Digital Arts Community of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques exhibit this summer.

Lee participated in a panel where artists shared their individual practices and the strategies to explore scientific visualization in relationship to digital art.

"We talked about the tension between representing concepts objectively versus representing it connotatively and subjectively," he said.

Lee's single-channel 3-D animation “evokes the language of physics, mathematics and quantum mechanics,” according to a press release from Clarkson.

Procedurally animated, the piece conveys concepts found in “The Little Book of String Theory” by Steven S. Gubser.

The flow of particles represent electrons, positrons and photons. Particles are animated visualizing what happens when an electron splits into anti-electrons during a cascade event -- an electromagnetic particle shower, the release said.

In quantum mechanical theory, a particle shower is a predictable event and suggests that an electron all by itself may have infinite charge and infinite mass, but once split, its charge and mass becomes finite.

A common example of particle showers would be when cosmic rays hit earth’s atmosphere. There is a commonality between the behavior of structures in the subatomic and cosmic scales -- the unseen behavior of particles follows the mathematical pattern of recursion, and is metaphorically related to the fractal structure of cosmic background radiation, the release said.

Learn more about “Fractals, Particles, Photos, Microwaves” at science-unseen.siggraph.org/lee/.