What is a Photograph?

Historical entanglements of light and sound

Our inaugural lecture of the Black Hole Photography Lecture Series started on Wednesday June 11, 2025  Time: 11-12 Location: Large Lecture Hall, Erjavčeva ulica 23., ALUO, Univerza v Ljubljani, Ljubljana 1000

Speaker: Jennifer Marine, MA,
University of Virginia, Art History

“In 2019, astronomers captured the now-iconic image of black hole M87—a photograph unlike any other. Made with no camera or film, how can such an image still be called a photograph?” Join us for a thought-provoking exploration of the fluid boundaries between photography and scientific imaging. This talk traces a fascinating arc from Margaret Watts-Hughes’s “Voice Figures” and Robert Williams Wood’s sound wave photography, to the radio-based imaging of deep space, interrogating the very definition of a photograph. Discover how light and sound have long been entangled in the visual history of science and art—blurring categories, challenging conventions, and reshaping how we see (and hear) the world.

Data Black Holes Versus Data Clouds:

Notes from the Extradate Era

Sreda, 24 september 2025 Time: 12.30–12.50. Location: Avditorij Narodne galerije, Ljubljana 1000 The lecture is part of the Sixth International Scientific Conference of the Department of Theoretical Sciences, UL ALUO

Asist. dr. Eszter Polonyi, UL FMF, UL ALUO, Kunstuniversität Linz

In 2005, two concerned civilians filed a lawsuit to shut down Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest scientific experiment designed to investigate quantum phenomena such as supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and dark matter. Their complaint was that, running at roughly 7 million times the energy per year of a single high-energy beam circulating within it, the LHC operated at energy levels that risked opening a black hole that would swallow the planet. The case was dismissed in 2008 on the basis of technical rather than scientific terms. Among the reasons given were absurdities to which the lawsuit gave rise within legal procedure, including the difficulty of finding a witness and producing a cost-benefit analysis in which the projected scientific outcomes of the experiment were measured against the future of the entire planet and “life as we know it.” Often referred to colloquially as the “doomsday lawsuit,” this case testifies to a newfound difficulty in adapting technical discourse to the planetary framework of the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer) within which the human scientific and cultural imagination has been operating over the last century.

This paper considers the fascination with black holes across technical, scientific and artistic types of imagination as a symptom of cognitive overwhelm at the level of data management (B. Bratton, T. Paglen, Y. Hui). At a time when the artificially intelligent agents collecting, storing, mining, and processing are starting to exceed planetary resources, hungry black holes and other extraplanetary phenomena have taken over from earthbound “clouds” (JD Peters) as metaphors of technical and conceptual expansion. The paper examines the off-world frontiers of data collection of what it calls the “Extradata Era” in contemporary photography and theoretical physics.

Black holes in the arts and beyond

Symposium: Ecology and Performing Arts, Amfiteater Journal of Performing Arts Theory, Slovenian Theatre Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, October 9-10

Asist. dr. Eszter Polonyi, UL FMF, UL ALUO, Kunstuniversität Linz

(with Sašo Grozdanov)

Short abstract: This talk examines how artists, scientists and critical thinkers have sought to radically unsettle normative conceptions of the self and the environment by engaging with the physics of black holes. The talk presents work being done on an interdisciplinary ARIS project being carried out at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty (FMF) and the Academy of Arts (ALUO) at the University of Ljubljana.

Black holes, the edge of knowledge, and what is knowable:

Past lessons and future challenges

Location: J19/F1, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Jadranska ulica 19, Ljubljana

Date: 17 November 2025, 2:15 p. m.

Speaker: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sašo Grozdanov

Black holes are probably the most fascinating objects in nature. Their study places us at the frontier between known and unknown physical laws—at the intersection of classical General Relativity, quantum physics, and the still-developing theory of quantum gravity. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss what black holes are, what we currently understand about them, what remains mysterious, and how they fit into the string-theoretic holographic (AdS/CFT) duality, which connects certain theories of quantum gravity to quantum field theories. I will then present some of my past research results that stem from studying black holes and their relation to quantum physics through holography. These include statements about hydrodynamics, many-body localisation, heavy-ion physics, and quantum chaos, all in strongly interacting quantum field theories. Finally, I will outline several foundational open problems in theoretical physics and reflect on the connections between physics, philosophy, and art.