What I learned from a black hole in Los Angeles

洛杉矶的黑洞教会了我们什么

On York Boulevard in Los Angeles, a blurred black hole hangs on a dark wall, joined only by a pair of headphones playing looping echoes of its siblings colliding.

在洛杉矶的约克大道上，一面昏暗的墙壁上悬挂着一个模糊的黑洞图案，旁边仅有一副耳机相伴，耳机中不断循环播放着其同类相互碰撞所产生的回声。

It's a familiar scene of our galaxy's supermassive central void, and certainly one that has flown far and wide over the years. I'd bet you've seen it. Journalists (including myself) have fawned over this image, affixing it to exhilarating news stories under titles like "First Image of Milky Way's Black Hole" or "Center of Our Galaxy Revealed." Universities have thrown it onto press releases about the Earth-spanning array of radio telescopes it owes itself to, and scientists have published it in heady studies while endearingly calling its subject just what it looks like: a fuzzy orange doughnut.

这是我们银河系中心超大质量黑洞的熟悉景象，多年以来，这一景象已经广为流传。我敢打赌你肯定见过。记者们（包括我自己）都对这张照片赞不绝口，把它附在令人振奋的新闻报道中，标题诸如“银河系黑洞的首张照片”或“揭晓银河系中心”。大学在新闻稿中纷纷展示这张图片，并把它归功于横跨地球的射电望远镜。科学家们也在令人陶醉的研究中发表了它，同时亲切地称其主体就像它看起来的那样：一个模糊的橙色甜甜圈。

However, at the OXY ARTS gallery in Los Angeles, that abstruse portrait of Sagittarius A* looks a little different.

然而，在洛杉矶的OXY ARTS画廊中，人马座A那幅深奥难懂的肖像画看起来却有些不同。

Isolated on its assigned wall, the 4.3-million-solar-mass black hole takes up space outside its usual astrophysical boundaries, both in the cosmos and in academia, to open itself up to artistic criticism and reflection. I have to admit, when I first saw it, my initial feeling was that it's curious to exhibit an unedited scientific image of the cosmos in an art gallery, and especially one that artists featured across the gallery didn't have a hand in creating. It seemed hollow, and even slightly ostentatious. But, after some time, I softened.

在这面指定的墙上，挂着这幅拥有430万太阳质量的黑洞图像。无论是在宇宙学领域还是在学术界，黑洞都突破了其通常的天体物理学界限，向艺术批评与反思敞开了大门。我不得不承认，当我第一次看到它时，我第一印象是在艺术画廊里展示一幅未经编辑的宇宙科学图像很奇怪，尤其是这幅图像画廊并非出自画廊中任何艺术家之手。它看起来很空洞，甚至略带炫耀之意。但是一段时间过后，我的态度有所缓和。

The intentionally empty area around Sgr A*'s frame seemed to actually punctuate its conceptual and visual weight in a way its typical online backdrop of search bars and Google Chrome tabs never has for me. The piece itself wasn't groundbreaking in my opinion, but the choice to put it up on a gallery wall at all might have been.

射手座A（Sgr A）画框周围特意留出空白的区域，以一种我从未在搜索栏和谷歌浏览器标签页等典型网络背景中所体验过的方式，真正凸显了其概念与视觉上的厚重感。在我看来，这幅作品本身并不具有划时代的意义，但把它挂在画廊的墙上却可能是开创性的举措。

This made me start to wonder whether wavelengths of art and science tend to constructively or destructively interfere with one another, or whether they are really the same to begin with. For example, something that is extremely intrinsic to art, but not to science, is the idea of individuality. A true work of art is often considered irreplicable, but an ideal scientific conclusion relies on replicability to prove itself as a universal truth.

这让我开始怀疑艺术和科学的波动是倾向于相互构建还是相互破坏，或者说它们是否从一开始就真的是一回事。例如，个性这一概念在艺术领域来说是极为内在，但在科学领域却不是。人们通常认为真正的艺术作品是不可复制的，但理想的科学结论却依赖于可复制性来证明其是一个普遍真理。

Though, on the other hand, one of the most well-known examples of someone who sang the song of art and science is Leonardo Da Vinci, whose masterpieces are specifically built on principles of anatomy, physics and mathematics. Would it be fair to ask which of the two disciplines came first for Da Vinci? Which was bubbling in his mind to begin with, reaching out to call for the other?

不过从另一方面来讲，唱响艺术和科学之歌的最广为人知的例子之一便是列奥纳多·达·芬奇，他的杰作正是建立在解剖学、物理学和数学原理之上的。那么我们问这两个学科中哪一个对达芬奇来说是最先出现的公平吗？是哪一个学科最初在他的脑海中涌现，进而呼唤着另一个学科的加入呢？

To be fair, I don't know whether I was wringing water from a stone with this thought. But even if I was, I think there's something interesting about that, too. French painter Marcel Duchamp once said in his 1957 talk about artistic criticism that "the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

平心而论，我不知道自己是不是在做无用功。但即便是这样，我认为这其中也有一些有趣的地方。法国画家马塞尔·杜尚曾在1957年的《艺术批评谈话》中提到：“创作行为并不是仅由艺术家独自完成；观众通过解读和阐释作品的内在特质，使作品与外部世界产生联系，从而也为创作行为做出贡献。”

This becomes more relevant when we think about why I was looking at this Sgr A* exhibit in the first place.

当我们思考我当初看这个射手座A展览的原因时，这就变得息息相关了。

For six days in September of last year, The Getty Museum's PST: Art and Science Collide event invited me to travel to about 30 galleries across Los Angeles and absorb the results of a challenge they gave various artists and art curators: to create exhibits that tiptoe the line separating art and science. In a sea of art journalists, I was one of the only science news representatives — if not the only one — meticulously searching canvases and sculptures for traces of contemporary discoveries and fundamental theories I'm so used to reading in black and white.

去年9月，在为期六天的时间里，盖蒂博物馆的“PST：艺术与科学碰撞”活动邀请我走访了洛杉矶约30家画廊，去体验他们向各种艺术家和策展人提出的一项挑战的成果：创作游走于艺术和科学界限之间的展览。在众多艺术记者中，我是唯一的科学新闻代表（也许不是唯一），我一丝不苟地在画布和雕塑上，寻找着那些我习惯于在白纸黑字中阅读的当代发现和基础理论的痕迹。

In other words, I arrived on this trip as an outsider.

换句话说，我是一个赴约的局外人。

Almost immediately, on day one, my status as a non-art-journalist became quite clear, and truthfully, enhanced the imposter syndrome I typically feel no matter the occasion. I didn't have the background knowledge of my peers when talking about up-and-coming artists, I didn't know the precise dynamics of art gallery bureaucracies and, more than once, I had to awkwardly ask one of my new friends how prolific the person I just talked to was. I simply didn't have the expertise necessary to comfortably judge art in an objective way, and in fact find the entire concept of artistic criticism a really complex one that's hard to penetrate. But what I did have was my knowledge of science.

几乎就在第一天，我作为一名非艺术记者的身份就变得非常明显。说实话，这加剧了我在任何场合都会感到的冒名顶替综合症。在谈论新晋艺术家时，我没有同行的背景知识，我不清楚美术馆官僚体系的精确运作方式。而且不止一次，我不得不尴尬地向我的新朋友打听，我刚刚交谈过的人有多高产。我不过是没有以客观方式轻松评判艺术所需的专业知识，而且事实上，我发现艺术批评的整个概念都非常复杂，很难理解。但我所拥有的是我对科学的了解。

Thus, I dutifully hunted for threads of equations in the art we saw — even if only to have something to hold on to. I treated it like a scientific conference, and this is where I started thinking about Duchamp's ideas.

因此，我尽职尽责地在我们所见的艺术作品中寻找方程式的线索——哪怕只是为了找到一些可以依托的东西。我把这当成一场科学会议，正是此时，我开始思考杜尚的思想。

Duchamp wondered about an elusive phenomenon in which a spectator reacts to a piece of work despite the artist technically having no part in that reaction. "This phenomenon is comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble," he says, and I think the transference greatly depends on the mental pathways one is already predisposed to taking.

杜尚对一种难以捉摸的现象感到好奇，即观众会对一件作品产生反应，尽管从技术上讲，艺术家并没有参与这种反应。他说：“这种现象可以比作一种从艺术家向观众转移的过程，就像通过颜料、钢琴或大理石等惰性物质发生的审美渗透一样。”并且我认为这种转移在很大程度上取决于一个个体已经倾向于采取的心理路径。

The concept reminds me of a scene from the TV show "Mad Men" in which someone buys an incredibly expensive piece of art but doesn't allow anyone in the workplace to see it. At last, a few characters manage to catch a glimpse, finding it to be no more than an annoyingly plain canvas with abstract red splotches. They immediately start reacting because they expected something more conventionally beautiful. But then, one of them, Ken, reflects that maybe reaction itself is the point. "When you look at it, you feel something," he states. Alas, without existing in the room, the artist managed to provoke emotion and spur a conversation about aesthetics.

这个概念让我想起了电视剧《广告狂人》中的一个场景，剧中有人买了一件及其昂贵的艺术品，但不允许工作场所的任何人看到。最后，几个角色设法瞥了一眼，却发现那不过是一幅令人厌烦的普通画布，上面只有抽象的红色斑点。他们立刻开始做出反应，因为他们期待的是更传统意义上的美。但随后，其中一人肯反思到，也许反应本身就是重点。“当你看着它时，你会有所感受，”他说。唉，艺术家虽然没到场，却成功激起了情感共鸣，激起了一场关于美学的讨论。

With these scientific art exhibits, it seemed like the artwork inherently required both artistic and scientific spectators' reactions to bring the pieces toward their true potential.

对于这些科学艺术展览来说，似乎这些艺术作品本身就需要艺术观众和科学观众的反应，才能充分展现出作品真正的潜力。

One exhibit took place in Doug Aitken's industrial art studio, where strings of light ricocheted across the wall as a film played on the artist's projector, depicting evocative dancers in an Amazon factory, drivers in the countryside and a myriad other human experiences. It made me wonder whether quantum entanglement had anything to do with the piece, seeing as photons are quantum particles and entanglement involves these particles being connected despite existing in separate locations. It's even possible if the particles are on opposite sides of the universe, like Amazon workers in delivery trucks and billionaires on private jets.

一个展览在道格·艾特肯（Doug Aitken）的工业艺术工作室举行，艺术家的投影仪上播放一部电影，一串串灯光在墙上反射跳跃，影片描绘了亚马逊工厂中引人深思的舞者、乡村里的司机和无数其他人类经历。因为光子是量子粒子，而纠缠态意味着这些粒子即便处于不同的位置也能相互关联，我不禁好奇这件作品是否与量子纠缠有关。如果这些粒子位于宇宙的两端，就像送货卡车上的亚马逊员工和私人飞机上的亿万富翁一样，这种可能性是有的。

However, someone else I met at the exhibition, who writes about dance, wasn't thinking about quantum mechanics. He pointed out the intricacies of the dancers' movements, and others across the room seemed to be paying close attention to Aitken's musical decisions and film direction.

然而，我在展览上遇到的另一个撰写舞蹈相关的文章的人，并没有考虑过量子力学。他指出了舞者动作的复杂性，而房间里的其他人似乎也在密切关注艾特肯的音乐选择和影片拍摄手法。

At the Hammer Museum, walking into a small veiled room brought you to a large glass box within which live bees build honeycomb patterns on top of sculptures that coax those patterns into works of art. I and three others watched as a bee flew to the bottom of the container and carried one of its dead brethren to the top, where there is a tunnel to the outside world.

在哈默博物馆，走进一个被遮掩的小房间，你会看到一个巨大的玻璃箱，里面的活蜜蜂在雕塑上建造蜂巢图案，这些图案被巧妙地引导成为艺术品。我和另外三个人看着一只蜜蜂飞到容器的底部，把一个死去的同伴搬到顶部，那里有一条通往外面世界的隧道。

In another room of this museum, a dynamic black hole exists inside a space that comes with a warning about epilepsy. We don't know what black holes look like to the unaided eye, but I started pondering out loud whether they'd need an epilepsy warning for those who can circumvent getting stretched into noodle-like strips when faced with the void's gravitational pull — to the horror of a writer I met who was trying to capture the exhibit's striking colors on his phone because those colors fluctuated in peculiar ways on his mobile camera.

在这家博物馆的另一个展厅里，有一个动态黑洞展示于此，旁边附有癫痫警告。我们不知道肉眼下的黑洞是什么样子的，但我开始疯狂思考，对于那些在面对虚空引力时可以避免被拉伸成面条状的人来说，它们是否需要癫痫警告——这让一位我遇到的作家感到恐惧，他正试图用手机捕捉展品的鲜艳色彩，因为这些色彩在他的移动相机上呈现出奇异的波动。

Nearby, you could sit on the floor and listen to the simulated sounds of the wilderness, while watching a video of the real wilderness, in front of a simulated pond with simulated ripples. I stayed there for a while, reminiscing about how this might be a window into our future once unchecked climate change ravages our world. Artwork at the SCI-ARC gallery, under the title "Views of Planet City" uses real satellite images and futuristic video game formats to imagine a hypothetical world in which humanity lives in a single city to allow the rest of the planet to heal. This brought me to tears in a way detached news about record temperatures didn't, and I noticed a few others having a similar reaction.

在附近，你可以坐在有着模拟涟漪的模拟池塘边的地板上，听模拟荒野的声音，同时观看真实荒野的视频。我在那里呆了一会儿，回忆着一旦不受控制的气候变化蹂躏我们的世界，这可能就是我们未来的一扇窗户。南加州建筑学院画廊的艺术作品《星球城市景观》使用了真实的卫星图像和未来主义的视频游戏格式，来想象一个假设的世界，在这个世界中，人类生活在单一的城市中，以便让地球的其他部分得到恢复。这让我泪流满面，而单纯的新闻报道中关于创纪录的高温却没能做到这一点，我注意到其他一些人也有类似的反应。

At the Brand Library and Art Museum, stalks of grass connected to mechanical blocks on the ground moved according to Martian wind patterns recorded by NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars. The movements were choppy not because the wind is jagged on Mars but because there are gaps in our data represented by gaps in the sway of the grass. Outside, a wall was decorated with bright yellow tape in a chevron pattern, tape that NASA uses to wrap instruments that blast off to locales far beyond Earth. On another wall, there was a microchip containing millions of people's names.

在布兰德图书馆和艺术博物馆，与地面上的机械装置相连的草茎按照美国国家航空航天局（NASA）毅力号火星车在火星上记录的火星风模式进行移动。这些移动看起来断断续续的，不是因为火星上的风是断断续续的，而是因为我们的数据中存在空白，这些空白体现在草茎摆动的间断上。在外面，一面墙上装饰着亮黄色的人字形胶带，这是美国国家航空航天局用来包裹发射到地球之外遥远地方的仪器。在另一面墙上，有一个存储着数百万人名字的微芯片。

It has since been sent on a journey to Jupiter's moon Europa.

此后，它送往了木星的卫星欧罗巴。

In his talk, Duchamp considered the two poles of the creation of art to be "the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity," giving essentially equal weight to both the creator and the one who witnesses the creation and carves its legacy.

在杜尚的演讲中，他认为艺术创作的两极是“一方面是艺术家，另一方面是后来成为后人的观众”，他给予了创作者和见证创作并传承其遗产的人基本同等的重视。

Seeing or feeling artwork can be thought of as part of the artwork itself, in a sense; this becomes complex when considering how many different people, from different generations and with different perspectives, will act as spectators.

在某种意义上，观看或感受艺术品可以视为是艺术品本身的一部分；当考虑到来自不同时代、拥有不同观点的不同的人将充当观众时，这一点就变得复杂了。

Scientific art managed to offer images to meanings I've conceptually considered for a long time, but I deeply wished I could see these pieces from the eyes of the art world to know how science might have enhanced, diminished or laterally woven into their experience. However, the individuality of art is unfortunately mirrored in the individuality of the creative act.

科学艺术成功地为我长久以来在概念上所思考的意义提供了图像，但我非常希望我能从艺术世界的角度来欣赏这些作品，以了解科学是如何增强、削弱或横向融入他们的艺术体验的。然而，艺术的个性却不幸地反映在创作行为的个性之中。

I especially felt this while standing under Olafur Eliasson's silver towers and peering upward. It was more mesmerizing than I can explain; it made it seem like light and mirrors are all you need to find a world in which physical infinity is within your grasp.

当我站在奥拉维尔·埃利亚松（Olafur Eliasson）的银塔下抬头仰望时，我尤其感受到了这一点。这比我所能描述的更加迷人；它让你觉得只需要光和镜子，就能找到一个物理上无限延伸，触手可及的世界。

Still, I knew that was just the science journalist in me speaking.

尽管如此，我知道这只是我内心的科学记者的只言片语。

This trip was funded by The Getty Museum as part of the PST: Art and Science Collide event.

本次访问由盖蒂博物馆资助，作为“PST：艺术与科学碰撞活动“的一部分。