branches

I shot the tree of light photo in December 2011. It popped up recently on my desktop thanks to the Rainmeter Enigma gallery, randomly selected. Good timing. Then one particular photo got me thinking about big structures. Really big structures.

I first noticed the shimmering white tree in the morning from the lounge area of the office I was working at. There was no snow on the ground but it made me think of pale blanketed fields among hibernating frosted forests. Winter. Stillness.

While the coffee robot prepared my first cup of joe, I took a couple of pictures from the twelfth floor. Top down. Tiny people scurrying past. Did they notice? It was bright even in the daylight.

Exiting the building after my gig, I spotted it across the street. Right! The FinePix camera couldn't quite handle the wild contrast so I headed to the north-east corner. Ah. It was not a real tree; but a tall steel structure with a wire frame simulation for bark, atop a tall white octagon. Covered, completely covered, in white light emitting diodes. Hundreds? Thousands? This tree released light instead of collecting it.

I looked up from the base. Pretty, the tree reaching into the darkening sky, up into space. Nestled amongst the scrapers of Bloor and Yonge. Centre of the Universe for some. Captured a few frames, camera aimed straight up.

An installation? Probably. I think some friends photographed it down in the Finance district, in the Valley of the Towers, just this December. The facsimile was quite good. Classic deciduous tree, solid trunk, secondary branches angling upwards, dividing, subdividing, down to thin shoots. Roots hidden from view. Converting energy. Giving back. Like how real plants remove carbon dioxide, provide fuel and fruit, make the planet better.

We simulate, on increasingly powerful computers, the birth of the Universe, from its initial smooth state at 1 billion years, to one now, governed by hidden dark matter, by most effectively but resistive invisible energy. The Bolshoi Simulation, with it's pure white and intense blue rendering, is mesmerising and haunting. There's a stillness, at a grand time scale.

Connective structures dominate our Universe now, some 13.7 billion years after the bang. Crossing and weaving. Thick trunks where massive clusters of massive galaxies co-habit. Branches thinned after stretching great distances to neighbouring clusters. Still smaller branches and shoots. Delicate wisps to individual galaxies. Reaching out in the spaces.

Light radiates into the void. Gravity moves material. Energy, dust, gas, flows and exchanges along this strong tissue.

It's clear. Everything is connected.

Creds:

• Photo by Blake Nancarrow. Fujifilm FinePix J20, 1/60, f/3.1, ISO 400, lens at 6mm.
• Screen grab from the The Bolshoi Cosmological Simulations web site at the University of California.