I would like, at some point, to get to tell the story of my first visit to the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, where I saw Cai Guo-Qiang’s “Gunpowder Drawings,” ‘painted’ with gunpowder. It was then and there—I remember this quite clearly—that I realized that the greatest things on Earth are created when science is used to create art.
For my sister’s birthday in 2011, my family went to see Blue Man Group NYC, an offbeat comedic music show. A powerhouse of color and sound, the show’s musical ingenuity was impressive and an engineering wonder. Halfway through the show, the Blue Men wheeled out a monstrous musical instrument. It was a collection of plastic plumbing pipes attached to one another. There’s a strange phenomenon that occurs when the end of an open pipe is struck with a hand or blunt instrument. The resulting sound from this sort of collision is a perfect, pure note. By arranging many tubes of various sizes, Blue Man Group had put together a hacked piano of sorts.
One day I was with my friend Daniel, someone with whom I have many shared enthusiasms. The story of Blue Man Group and the pipe organ came up a lot due to our passion for tinkering and learning. When I first suggested that we try to make one of our own, it clicked right into place. What musical, engineering-minded teenager doesn’t want to make a mind-blowing musical instrument?
Our machine would be our machine alone. The pipe organ would have 10 total pipes, and each would have a note in a two-octave minor pentatonic scale. The minor pentatonic scale has only five notes in an octave, which means fewer pipes are needed to establish a wide range of sounds. Yes, we wanted the creation to be grandiose and majestic, but also reasonable.
The planning process was two-fold: first, figuring out the lengths of all the pipes needed, and second, planning out their organization. The first required learning the frequencies of specific notes and how those notes could be produced by the pipes. The length of the pipe would determine the wavelength of the sound wave produced. Luckily, most notes used in music have wavelengths on a human scale. For example, the wavelength of middle C is about 1.3 meters. We finished the planning process with an organized list of the lengths of all the notes we needed.
The process of cutting the pipes wasn’t very interesting. We went out one day, bought some pipes, and hacksawed them to the lengths on our chart.
If you will, I’d like to tell you about the Guggenheim now.
For a field trip in the fourth grade, I went with my class to the Guggenheim. We explored the building, getting a taste of what the front lines of modern art had to offer. Eight years later, I can remember only one of the many pieces we saw that day: Cai Guo-Qiang’s “Gunpowder Drawings”. They were a series of very large pieces of paper, upon which had been laid gunpowder, fuses, miscellaneous rocks, and debris. The explosives were lit, and the resulting mess was preserved on the paper and shipped to the museum. The creations were gigantic and so full of energy; one could almost feel the heat of the explosions from which these works of art were born. I had a revelation. I realized exactly what it was that made the gunpowder art so cool: the greatest human creations come about when art is used to express science. The experience I had with the pipe organ was a perfect example of what wonderful things can happen in the magical realm between science and art. Since that day, my interest has resided in exploring the boundary between the arts and sciences; only in that space can I feel as powerful as Cai Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder drawings made me feel.