Steampunk-Inspired Artwork Evokes Devices That Convert Energy From One Form to Another
Artist and designer Bruce Rosenbaum has made a career out of melding new tech and old gadgets in whimsical ways: an imagined “original Zoom machine,” a beer-dispensing aquarium tank, a time-traveling photo booth for a noted fantasy author.
He’s been dubbed “the steampunk guru” by The Wall Street Journal for his mastery of the genre that combines Victorian-era aesthetics like brass, gears and steam with modern technology. But he never tried imagining a device at the atomic scale until connecting with a University of Maryland scientist.
Image courtesy of Empire Group and Bruce Rosenbaum
Nicole Yunger Halpern, who coined the term “quantum steampunk” to describe her retrofuturistic combination of 19th and 21st century physics, and Rosenbaum over the past five years led a team in crafting an artwork to represent the eclectic mashup: an 8-inch, metallic, partially 3D-printed sculpture of a quantum engine.
“It’s been a privilege to interact with someone who is based in such a different world. I’m in physics, Bruce is in art. And yet, we both have a very strong shared interest in connecting the steam-powered world of the Industrial Revolution to today,” said Yunger Halpern, a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and an adjunct assistant professor in UMD’s Department of Physics and Institute for Physical Science and Technology.
Supported by UMD’s Arts for All program, the sculpture made its debut last week at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in honor of the United Nations’ Year of Quantum Science and Technology, and is being brought to campus this week, where it will later go on display.
Rosenbaum, based in Massachusetts, first encountered Yunger Halpern by watching one of her lectures about quantum thermodynamics. He saw something extraordinary in Yunger Halpern’s work—in terms of cutting-edge science and artistic possibility.
“For me, steampunk is a fusion of history plus art plus technology, and trying to tell the story of moving from the past and innovating into the present and the future,” Rosenbaum said. “Nicole’s incredible realization that classical thermodynamics and engines on the macro scale could help us to explore a way to build a single atom engine on the quantum scale was our inspiration to build a steampunk quantum engine using movement, lighting and sound to tell the story.”