2017

Commissioned by The University of Texas at Austin. Presented in Omnibus Filing, an exhibition at the Visual Arts Center, UT Austin. Curated by James Sham and Brian Korgel.

In this video, my disembodied beard interviews Dr Andrea Alu, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin. The subject is Dr Alu’s research on invisibility and metamaterials - materials engineered to have properties that are not found in nature.

Dr Alu has been exploring metamaterials that can make objects partially invisible, and most recently has focused his research on creating a circulator of acoustic waves that challenges the theoretical symmetry of the physical laws under time reversal transformation. 

Interestingly, the Jewel Scarab Beetle, Chrysina gloriosa, photographed reflecting Monet’s Water Lilies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, can make itself effectively invisible without the help of metamaterials by bending circularly polarized light. The photograph was taken during a discussion I had with Parish Brady, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Integrative Biology at UT Austin, about Brady’s research on invisibility as related to circularly polarized light.

Materials: Single channel video 10 minutes, digital print 14in x 17in.