The Sun’s Glow, the Black Hole’s Shade: Where Observation Begins & Ends

Eszter Polónyi and Sašo Grozdanov, When Observation Becomes Entanglement: Physics, Photography, and Data
A black hole, by definition, should not be observable. It appears as a patch of darkness in the sky, a circular absence of light. This paper examines the paradoxical role attributed to the human observer, when the observer no longer stands outside the system as a neutral witness but becomes entangled with it, their act of looking shaping what can be seen and known. The paper considers the heightened epistemic significance of the observer in two moments of vast expansion in the dimensions of the universe: first, physicists’ imaging of supermassive black holes in the 2020s, and second, the emergence of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Drawing on images at the limit of imaging, the talk considers the ways in which the dark body of the observer has repeatedly been called upon to theorize uncertainty.

Rohini Devasher, One Hundred Thousand Suns. How Closely Can We Know Our Nearest Star?
In this talk, artist Rohini Devasher takes us through her most recent work, One Hundred Thousand Suns, a four-channel film installation that brings into conversation the geometry of the Earth, Moon and Sun, alongside conjunctions of event and site. Poetic, speculative and deliberately discrete, this work foregrounds the reality that the site, the observer, and the methods of observation and collection may produce multiple readings and avatars of data. The trajectory of the Sun’s observations, spanning from hand drawn sunspots on small disks of paper from the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory archives in South India to the artist’s own data – are navigated to explore the complexities of observational astronomy, and the ways in which ‘seeing’ is strange, wondrous, and more ambiguous than one might imagine.

The Zoolink to follow the event also online will be soon published HERE.

Eszter M Polónyi is a postdoc at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, where she is employed on the state-subsidized project “The Photo of a Black Hole: Physics Meets Photography.” She was trained as a historian of art and is also a postdoc at the Art University of Linz in Austria. Her work examines how technologies of vision—from early film and photography to artificial intelligence—shape the ways we understand data, evidence, and the unseen.

Sašo Grozdanov is an associate professor of physics at the University of Ljubljana and at the Higgs Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh. Much of his work has been devoted to the study of black holes, both from the perspective of physics and, more recently, also from the point of view of interdisciplinary studies.

Rohini Devasher is an artist based in Delhi, working across diverse media at the intersections of the humanities and the sciences. She has been honored by Deutsche Bank as “Artist of the Year” for 2024 and her work is currently shown at MUDEC in Milan. Devasher’s projects illuminate the weird, seductive, and entangled worlds that emerge from deep research and scientific exploration.

Scientific Organization:Sietske Fransen and Nina Caviezel