The Superposition

invisible, especially when the piece was
lit at night.
On Light Night 2013 Unit Cell was shown
in Parkinson Court at The University of
Leeds. As a result, it was seen by Dr.
Arwen Pearson, one of the organizers of
the Bragg Centenary Lecture to be given
by Daniel Shechtman (2011 Chemistry
Nobel Laureate) and Unit Cell was
consequently commissioned for an
exhibition to precede the lecture.
Shechtman had received the Nobel
Prize for his work on quasicrystals,
which are aperiodic lattices analogous
to Penrose Tiles. By the serendipity that
is Superposition, Penrose Tiles and an
exploration of the possibility of a threedimensional
analogue had been the
subject of Dominic Hopkinson’s contribution
to the first Superposition Artist-
Scientist-Maker symposium the previous
year. The members of the build team
were invited to attend Schectman’s
lecture and hear, first hand, the serendipitous
confluence of his ideas and
research as it related directly to the
theories behind Unit Cell.
Shortly after this, Dr. Pearson left The
University of Leeds to take up a major
role at DESY, the German Electron
Synchrotron facility based at University of
Hamburg. Her team, the Pearson Group,
based in the Centre for Ultrafast Imaging
at DESY, focuses on understanding how
macromolecular structure leads to
function; how large molecules are not
static and thus need to be understood
both spatially and temporally. Upon her
arrival Dr. Pearson contacted Superposition
and commissioned Unit Cell for
DESY, built and installed on campus for
the Nacht des Wissens (Night of Knowledge)
an event similar to Leeds Light
Night, but held every two years for public
access to the University.
Lawrence, Dominic and later on Ben,
went to Hamburg and rebuilt Unit Cell.
Over the course of a week we refined
the process using much better quality
materials.
At DESY, Unit Cell was sited outside, so
we were able to test how far the effect
travelled, and discovered that it was
effective at least 300 metres away! This
gave audiences and us a lot of space
within which to explore the soundscape
that the sculpture’s structure created.
People explored it in many different
ways; some rode bikes round it, others
ran towards and away from it (this created
a Doppler effect of sorts). There was
also ducking, jumping, dancing, arguing
(usually between parents and children)
and one deaf family used balloons to feel
the sound vibrations. Once audience
members had experienced the sound
diffraction, many wanted to know more
about how it worked, the theory behind
it and how that related to the research
being done at DESY. So, in between
playing, with the help of Arwen and her
team, we spent 12 hours discussing the
work with the German public (in very bad
German on our part, and embarrassingly
good English on theirs) and how these
ideas related to research being done at
DESY.
With predictable German efficiency the
work was then craned over the building
it was displayed outside of, and sited
“permanently” in an inner courtyard.
However, after about a year it was badly
damaged during a storm, after which we
assumed it would not be rebuilt. We were
wrong and the latest iteration of Unit Cell,
built with longer lasting and more robust
materials rose from the tatters, and is still
at DESY, Hamburg.
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