This is my entry to the LMAC Dark Matter special edition competition which really got my creative juices flowing after a long-ish absence from hive while I got over Covid and moved apartment.
This collaboration between STEM and the LMAC community is a great way to explore the confluences between science, art and for myself creative writing. After reading @lemouth's fascinating blog O dark Matter Where Art Thou I came to something of a triple pronged epiphany.
There is a reason I took up creative writing as a profession (I did want to be a marine biologist as a child and took the sciences up to A level) as the scientific process doesn't suit how my brain works. I can follow the process and understand scientific theories/application, but it's not the way I'm wired. It is always an interesting yet time consuming struggle to finally understand the minutia of scientific experimentation to come to a solid conclusion, and I realized this during my A level studies (A levels are just before university level in the UK) as I struggled to get average marks despite putting a lot of time/effort in.
Creative leaps of faith do have a place in science. As we have seen with major incidences of forsight from science fiction writers, technological and theoretical discoveries have mirrored 'creative leaps of faith' in science fiction writing. Two examples of this are authors such as Authur C Clarke who imagined the tablet computer with remarkable accuracy in the late 1960s in his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, describing a Newspad, a “foolscap-sized” device with a large screen allowing someone to “conjure up the world’s major electronic papers" and Bruce Sterling, who in his 1994 book Heavy Weather, describes cryptocurrencies so accurately it has caused some speculation that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto.
After reading lemouth's blog an idea started to blossom in my writer's mind - a creative expression of the multi universe theory playing out through a constant interaction of matter from alternative dimensions. Could dark matter in our universe be a reflection of matter in an alternative universe? The constant interplay between dark matter and matter within our universe and between alternative dimensions could be an extremely complex balancing act between infinite universes, a way for reality to mirror infinitely.
In order for such a process to happen, we need to focus on regions of the universe that are dense in dark matter, so that we could actually have two dark matter particles that can get to know each other very closely. Such regions exist (which is good news for the considered process to happen). They include, for example, the centre of the Milky Way or dwarf spheroidal galaxies, i.e. galaxies with very little stars and mostly made of dark matter.
@lemouth blog O dark Matter Where Art Thou
In this example above could it be that this area of our galaxy/universe corresponds to areas that are particularly dense in matter in a myriad of other universes? Thus creating a patch of dark matter in our universe as the pattern of dense matter in (perhaps younger) universe interact with ours? Maybe cosmological features such as dwarf spheroidal galaxies in our universe maintain a balance through interactions with matter in other universes.
The ideas arising from this third 'creative leap of faith' is where the animated art I made came from. I wanted to create a sense of a possible bridge, or interplay between realities through an infinite patterning. A brief visual reflection of two universes within a portal, a small glimpse of ever changing iterations of reality created through the constant interactions between matter and dark matter.
As I said earlier, this is only a theory dreamed up by an avid reader and writer of Science Fiction.
The job of a good creative writer (writer of fiction, scripts or poetry) - especially in the field of speculative fiction (fantasy/horror/Sci-Fi) - is to dream up worlds with some type of structural internal logic around far-future science, or in fantasy fiction magical practices.
I think this is a different application of creativity than that which scientists employ, but I do think that there are overlaps, and as has been seen in the past, remarkable moments of serendipity where writers have imagined aspects of the future world many decades before technologies came to pass. Also it is well documented that Albert Einstein (and other scientists) had moments of epiphany and creativity that led to great discoveries.
"I'm enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited; imagination encircles the world."
--Quoted in interview by G.S. Viereck, October 26, 1929. Reprinted in Glimpses of the Great (1930).
This does beg the question: did the seemingly prophetic ideas writers came up with slip into the human collective consciousness only to be recreated through a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy? Or were the writers themselves so actively interested in science that they rightly guessed the way the future was heading?
To answer this question it's essential to look at the source of inspiration. I think that creative writing, and the wellspring of creativity as I have experienced it, stems more from the subconscious than the conscious mind. My process always seems to follow a very similar pattern, starting with research (or a general interest) in a subject, then a period where I remove myself from the research, followed by some moment of inspiration for a story often arising from dreams or moments of mental stillness.
This experience of inspiration in my process convinces me that prophetic writer's such as Authur C Clarke (mentioned above) gleaned moments of foresight from the workings of their subconscious, perhaps that spark of inspiration came from the vastly complex workings and associations from waking life that the unconscious deconstructs during sleep.
In my experience with creative writing, inspiration is like a bolt from the subconscious. Then you have to follow up with conscious reasoning to build believable characters, plotlines and story arcs.
Perhaps it is the same for scientists and they instead follow up with designing and implementing experimentation to prove the insight gleaned in a moment of inspiration, but I suspect that it more often starts from the realm of logic and the conscious.
It is an interesting distinction, and I do think that we writers have it easier 😂
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
Media Resources Used for Gif Animation
I used a lot of images from the LMAC Image Library for this collage, but had to source a few from Pexels & pixabay as well:
 Contributed to the #LIL by @evagavilan2. |  Contributed to the #LIL by @agmoore. |
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 Contributed to the #LIL by @justclickindiva. |  Contributed to the #LIL by @eve66. |
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 Competition image from @shaka post found here |  Image by Bergadder on Pixabay |
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 Photo by Drew Rae from Pexels |  Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash |
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Digital Art Process
I will be brief with explaining the process behind how this digital art was made as it took a lot of time to make, and I feel the blog above exploring the subject of inspiration is much more interesting to be honest.
About half of the time creating this collage was spent in removing backgrounds from three of the LIL images I used and the Pixabay image of the trees reflected in the lake.
Some of these were easier to do using the fuzzy select tool in GIMP such as the amazing fractal image from @justclickindiva as the background was black. But the bubbles were much harder to isolate to transparent background due to the blue colour being in both the sky and the bubbles. Similarly in @agmoore's tree there were areas of white within the bark of the desiccated tree, so both these needed some meticulous work with the GIMP eraser tool.
Once the transparency work was completed I added the tree to the bubble picture plus various elements to represent flowers on the tree and strange creatures trying to eat the flowers.
I then added the galaxy image layer into the GIMP file with the trees reflected in the lake with the lake erased to transparency. This created the effect that the galaxy was within the lake.
The portal effect was made for a previous piece of art using the tutorial below.
But I changed and added to this portal effect in the animation by creating two layers with different colours, setting the brighter (not purple) layer at a low opacity.
To create the final animation I created three PNG files, one with just the non-purple portal with transparent background and then two PNGs with the different scenes in the centre of the purple version of the portal with everything outside the portal area transparent.
The final steps to animate the sequence basically involved making multiple copies of the two world images with the original space image from @shaka as the background, manipulating the opacity to create the fade in and out effect.
Notes for the different opacity levels to create the exact same fade in and out sequence.
Finally, I loaded all these different images into GIMP in a specific order, optimized them to Gif with the animations filter and then changed the frame time to 4000ms on the two 100% opacity images so that they stayed on screen for long enough for the viewer to get an impression of what was happening in the scenes.
After watching the preview a few times I decided I was happy with my windows into other universes, and was happily surprised that the gif rendered sub 15MB so that I could upload it to hive without messing about with compression software.
I hope you have enjoyed this glimpse into my multidimensional mind 😂
Thanks for reading.
All image sources in this post are CC licence made using GIMP Photo Editing Suit all from CC licence sources. I have set @lmac as 20% beneficiary of this post's rewards to help support the community, and added 2% beneficiary to @agmoore @eve66 @justclickindiva & @evagavilan2 for using their images.
If you have enjoyed this creative post, please check out my homepage @raj808 for similar content.
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