Jeweled Net of the Vast Invisible, 

immersive installation, video projection and acoustic environment

Jeweled Net of the Vast Invisible is a visualization of the distribution of dark matter in the universe based on data from the massive billion-particle Millennium Simulation. It was the result of a collaboration with cosmologist Greg Tarle and composer/musician Steven Rush, with the help of graduate students Jason Eaton (Computer Science) and Simon Alexander-Adams (Music, Theater, and Dance), with contributions from cosmologist Brian Nord (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory).

As we travel through this computer-generated space we see structures, halos, filaments, and voids which owe their existence to minute quantum fluctuations when the universe was first launched. These structures, amplified by inflation, propagated by sound and intensified by gravity, formed the invisible net that captured the matter that made up the first stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters, the “jewels” that we see as we look out on the universe today.

In April 2014 and May 2015, two successive versions of the collaboration were installed as a panoramic projection and acoustic environment at the University of Michigan’s Vido Production Studio at the Duderstadt Center.