Imagine Science Film Festival’s Nature Scientific Merit Award went to Magnetic Movie, a 4-minute, 47-second short by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor Films. Theirs was one of 50 films representing 9 countries and selected from over 250 submissions.
Here’s the link to this mysterious work of art, possibly about science and possibly not. More about that in a moment.

The British artists spent five months at the NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley under a fellowship from England’s Arts Council. The film is intriguing both because of its subject and the techniques used to glean information, interpret it, and represent it.

I asked Jarman and Gerhardt about the inspiration for Magnetic Movie. After roaming the Space Science halls and labs in 2005, they interviewed scientists about their research on magnetic fields. Some were studying them on Mars, the Aurora Borealis, and the Sun. The scientists had worked with data from satellites and generated computer visualizations of millions of lines of varying geometries. They animated these over time to show how the geometries change shape because of external influences.

“We have taken the basic form and motion of these visualizations to create our own elaborations of this visual language,” said Jarman and Gerhardt. In interviews, the scientists explained their findings using analogies and metaphors for the artists’ benefit. As a result of this effort “to find a common language,” the filmmakers learned of “hairy balls” on the sun and “dancing dots,” for example. When there were no likenesses, the scientists described abstract form and motion. “Being confronted with the unseeable and the unknown challenged our capacities to make sense of such an experience,” Jarman and Gerhardt said, “Each scene introduces a different visualization technique suitable to the forms the scientists are describing.” They also added color and sound from very low frequency recordings.

Interestingly, they chose to use stills–photographs of laboratories such as the “high bay” (at the beginning of the film), which is used for making balloons and sending them into the atmosphere, and clean rooms for instruments loaded onto the THEMIS satellite. Then they re-shot the photos with a deliberately jostled camera to “suggest someone witnessing events occurring…so it wasn’t a science documentary, but more someone coming across these (phenomena in the labs) by accident.”

The filmmakers said scientists would deem their film inaccurate but that it was never their intention to make a teaching tool. “It’s an artwork. It’s playing with the language of science, our experiences of the physical world, material, and interpretation.” Jarman and Gerhardt said.

In fact, Magnetic Movie is the subject of debate on online forums. People argue whether it is “real” or not, that is, whether audiences are witnessing an actual event. Some of the Berkeley scientists even received emails and phone calls from other scientists asking how they were conducting these experiments.

The filmmakers are delighted at “this whole myth-making,” and though they feel they are observing the controversy from the outside, they think it’s great. Great indeed, that people are so captivated by this work that they interact and passionately exchange ideas. Although I feel a little ambivalent about the confusion this oeuvre has caused. Here’s the discussion on Discover Magazine’s site. Here’s another on Gizmodo.com

I asked science writer and Imagine Science Film Festival Judge Carl Zimmer why he chose Magnetic Movie for the award. “I just loved how the filmmakers created this surreal world overlaid on top of an ordinary lab, simply by letting us see what magnetic field lines can look like,” he said, “Until now, I’ve had to make do with boring textbook diagrams. Now I have a new vision.”

Tags: Aurora Borealis, Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, Gizmodo.com, imagine science film festival, Joe Gerhardt, magnetic fields, Magnetic Movie, Mars, NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, Ruth Jarmon, Semiconductor Films, Sun, TV and Film

About Karen Frenkel: Karen A. Frenkel covers science, technology, and their impacts on society. Her articles have appeared on SciAm.com, in Scientific American, and Communications of the ACM. She has also produced two documentaries for Public Television—one on women and computing and the other on online learning. Email her at kfrenkel@nyc.rr.com, follow her on Twitter as KarenAFrenkel, and visit her website, www.karenafrenkel.com.

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