The Leading Strand - Invisible Worlds: Dark Matter

For this project, me and a team of 4 other designers assisted Dr. Katie Mack by visually describing her research on dark matter. I assisted by researching the history and theory of dark matter and recontextualized it based on public interest Team Members: Tania Allen, Rhett Hissam, Dylan Bryant, and Justin Hill. Official Project Website: https://www.theleadingstrand.org/invisible-worlds/

Despite its intangible nature, light is affected by gravity - bending towards dense clusters of mass. Our exhibit simulates the cosmic web and the effects of gravitational lensing, illustrating how the distortion of light can reveal the presence of dark matter.

The wire lattice above represents the cosmic web: the map of the universe that consists of clusters of galaxies which are held together by blobs of dark matter. We can only see about 5% of the matter in the universe, hence only 5% of the web. This is represented by light refracted on the floor, which are just mere reflections of their actual structure.

Process:

Diagrams for the top layer of the web, inspired by curve stitching.

The clear orbs represent dark matter, while the red faceted beads represent visible matter. We originally intended to use clear faceted beads to induce more refraction, but ended up putting them outside of the orbs to represent smaller clumps of dark matter. In the back you can also see how we used Mylar to create the illusion of warped space in our tunnel.

The "tunnel" halfway through completion. The Mylar's effect can again be see here, along with the warped reflections it causes.

Dark matter is so massive that its gravity causes light to bend. This makes space looked warped to us, almost like a fun-house mirror!

Closer to us, the orbs look normal. As we look farther back, however, they start to look distorted and warped. Though we "can't see" anything, we know something must be there causing the warping. Dark matter is merely the term we use to describe the invisible thing that is warping light!

↑Back to Top