Katie Paterson: 100 Billion Suns - Haunch of Venison

Katie Paterson, 100 Billion Suns

Katie Paterson: 100 Billion Suns is at Haunch of Venison until 28 April.

Paterson's projects engage with time, space and scale. 100 Billion Suns involves the firing of confetti cannons and refers to Gamma Ray Bursts - these are the brightest explosions in the universe, which burn with a luminosity 100 billion times that of our sun. The confetti cannons contain 3,216 pieces of paper whose colours correspond to each of these cosmic events known to have occured. Every burst of confetti creates a miniature explosion of all of these vast explosions, in just under a second. Watch a film about this project here.

Read an article by Brian Dillon, watch When art meets astronomy, and Tate Shots: Meet the Artist.

Below is  a selection of Paterson's works as described on her website. 

Katie Paterson,  As the World Turns

A turntable that rotates in time with the earth, one revolution every 24 hours, playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. If performed from beginning to end, the record would play for four years. The movement is so slow it isn't visible to the naked eye, yet the player is turning, imperceptibly.

Katie Paterson, History of Darkness, 2010 ( 2200 handwritten slides)

History of Darkness is a slide archive; a life-long project, it will eventually contain hundreds upon thousands of images of darkness from different times/places in the history of the Universe, spanning billions of years. Each image handwritten with its distance from earth in light years, and arranged from one to infinity.

Katie Paterson, Streetlight Storm, 2010

For one month on Deal Pier in Kent, during the hours of darkness, the pier lamps flicker in time with lightning strikes happening live in different parts of the world. Lightning signals from as far away as the North Pole or North Africa are received by an antenna on the pier and translated into light. As the pattern of lightning strikes changes, so the pier lights oscillate correspondingly.

Katie Paterson, All the Dead Stars (detail)

 A map documenting the locations of just under 27,000 dead stars - all that have been recorded and observed by humankind.

Katie Paterson,  Ancient Darkness TV

Working with astronomers from the Mauna Kea Volcano telescope, an image of ‘ancient darkness’ was transmitted on New York television station MNN. Broadcast for one minute, it revealed darkness from the furthest point of the observed universe, 13.2 billion years ago, shortly after the Big Bang and before Earth existed, when stars, galaxies and the first light began to form.

Katie Paterson, Vatnajökull (the sound of)

An underwater microphone lead into Jökulsárlón lagoon - an outlet glacial lagoon of Vatnajökull, filled with icebergs - connected to an amplifier, and a mobile-phone, which created a live phone line to the glacier. The number +44(0)7757001122 could be called from any telephone in the world, the listener put through to Vatnajökull. A white neon sign of the phone number hung in the gallery space.

(Listen to a recorded extract of Vatnajökull (the sound of) here.)