The black hole: one of nature’s most powerful and ominous structures. Arguable the most powerful structures in the universe, quasars, are themselves powered by the accretion disk surrounding rotating black holes. That a star could collapse so completely that even light is unable to escape, was for a long time a completely foreign and abhorrent concept, thought to be utterly impossible in our universe. However, today it is understood that black holes actually rather abundant. They exist not only as physical objects in our universe, but as inspiration for film, literature, and art.
Courtesy of Fabian Oefner
This series of photographs titled ‘Black Hole’ by Fabian Oefner, is an amazing set of works keeping in the galactic motif of many of the artist’s creations. Below is an in depth description of the works and the process provided by the artist.
“Black Hole” is a series of images, which shows paint modeled by centripetal force. The setup is very simple: Various shades of acrylic paint are dripped onto a metallic rod, which is connected to a drill. When switched on, the paint starts to move away from the rod, creating these amazing looking structures.
The motion of the paint happens in a blink of an eye, the images you see are taken only millisecond after the drill was turned on. To capture the moment, where the paint forms that distinctive shape, I connected a sensor to the drill, which sends an impulse to the flashes. These specialized units are capable of creating flashes as short as a 1/40000 of a second, freezing the motion of the paint.
Courtesy of Fabian Oefner
