Daily Archives: November 28, 2021

Danish esports organisation Team Singularity has announced a partnership with gaming chair manufacturer AndaSeat.

According to the release, the deal will see AndaSeat equip Team Singularitys players and influencers with its gaming chairs.

RELATED: EXCEL ESPORTS partners with AndaSeat

In addition, the gaming chair manufacturer will giveaway products through Team Singularitys academy, as well as to students within its development programme. AndaSeat and Team Singularity will also work together to create a special edition Singularity-branded gaming chair next year.

Allen He, AndaSeats Global Brand and Marketing Director, noted that the company hopes to utilise the partnership to gain more brand exposure in the European Union and Denmark. Moreover, he cites that the partnership with Team Singularity will provide AndaSeat with more acceptance from more gamers.

Team Singularity joins the likes of Fnatic, EXCEL ESPORTS and NAVI as partners of the gaming chair manufacturer.

RELATED: Fnatic extends partnership with AndaSeat

Atle S. Stehouwer, Founder and CEO of Team Singularity, commented: Im thrilled to partner up with AndaSeat on the Team Singularity journey, and Im looking forward to be extra comfortable in their gaming chairs.

This partnership also gives us a great opportunity to provide gaming chairs for all our players and staff, to all corners of the world.

The partnership follows on from Team Singularitys decision to team up with the University of Roehampton for the NLC, League of Legends Nordic, UK and Ireland regional league.

Esports Insider says: AndaSeat is steadily becoming a strong contender in the gaming chair market. Its most recent partnership with Team Singularity, alongside its established partners in Fnatic and NAVI, will see the company gain more exposure in Europe.

Sign up to our ESI Dispatch Newsletter

See the rest here:

Team Singularity secures AndaSeat sponsorship - Esports Insider

The lunar surface is a record of the solar systems violent origins. But look closely enough and we may find something even more exotic therethe cratered remains of an impact with a black hole the size of an atom, birthed in the first moments of the universe.

According to a theory proposed by Bernard Carr and Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, the conditions just after the Big Bang were so energetic, the matter so tightly packed, that density fluctuations in the primordial soup collapsed into black holes of all sizes.

On one end of the spectrum, the ancestors of supermassive black holes emergedon the other end, tiny black holes, some no larger than atoms.

The Big Bang would have created these primordial black holes in such abundance that some scientists believe they could make up a fraction of the universes dark matter. The thing is, no one knows if primordial black holes, massive or microscopic, exist.

Which is where a new study comes in.

If swarms of tiny black holes have ever zipped through the solar system, a select few of them may have punched holes in planets and moons.

On Earth, the scars of such collisions would have long healed, eroded away by the work of wind, water, and plate tectonics. But the moons surface is another matter. If a mini black hole punctured the moon, the crater could still be there. We could find it.

According to the paper, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in June, a collision with a mini black hole ought to leave a distinct signature. The studys authors, Matthew Caplan and Almog Yalinewich, propose we survey the moons surface for craters with the right attributes. If we find one (or more) such craters, and confirm its origin, wed have found evidence not only of primordial black holes but a dark matter candidate too.

Caplan admits it sounds a little wild, but thats kind of the point. When people think about dark matter, theyre usually fixated about trying to extend existing methods, for the most part, he told CNET. Its very rare that people try to think outside the box.

Not long after Hawking and Carr suggested primordial black holes could still be wandering the cosmos, researchers realized they could solve another riddle: the nature of dark matter. Stars orbit their galaxies much too fast given all the matter we can see. This invisible component, whose gravity can clearly be observed in stellar orbits, is called dark matter. To this day, no one knows what it is.

Over the years, the most popular dark matter theory has suggested its made up of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), but scientists have yet to find any such particles.

In parallel, the notion that primordial black holes could comprise some of the universes dark matter has gone in and out of fashion as evidence has tipped the scales this way and that. But in 2016, the first detection of gravity waves jolted the idea back to life.

That scientists had recorded ripples in the fabric of space-time, caused by the enormous collision and merger of two black holes, was mind-boggling enough. But after a closer look, the masses of the two black holes involved made researchers do a double take.

Star-sized black holes commonly form when a giant star, many times the size of our sun, exhausts its internal fuel and collapses in on itself. The stars outer shell is blasted away in a brilliant explosion called a supernova, while the core, unable to resist gravity, implodes into a point of extreme density. Gravity becomes so strong near the center of a black hole that, beyond a threshold called the event horizon, nothing, not even light, can escape.

Before the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected its first black hole merger, the largest star-sized black holes astronomers had discovered were about 20 times the mass of our sun. The black holes in LIGOs first observation were over 30 solar masses, the biggest yet discovered.

Many of the subsequent 90 detections have involved black holes with masses in the same range or even larger, with some weighing as much as 100 solar masses. Primordial black holes, its believed, ought to be found in this larger mass range (and also in ranges smaller than a single solar mass).

The peculiar size of merging black holes, combined with the sheer number observed, may help scientists confirm the existence of large primordial black holes. But what about the little ones on the other end of the spectrum? To estimate what fraction of dark matter primordial black holes make up (if they exist), scientists need to set bounds in the size distribution.

We already know, for example, that the very smallest black holesthose with masses below your average asteroidwould have evaporated by now. Others might still be around but should emit X-rays we could observe and measure.

Hawking famously established that black holes radiate energy away, and given a long enough time, they disappear in a flash. But primordial black holes with slightly larger masses, yet still not much larger than atoms, would have lifespans longer than the current age of the universe and wouldnt otherwise be detectable.

This is why our paper is significant, Yalinewich told CNET. We prove a range that cant be proven by other methods.

Focusing on black holes in this range, Caplan and Yalinewich modeled the impact of an average asteroid or meteorite and compared it to that of a mini black hole. They found the two would be noticeably different.

The former would be roughly the same density as the moon and transfer all its energy on impact; the latter would be far more dense than the moon and would punch straight through to the other side with little resistance.

Theyre going at incredible speeds, 200 kilometers a second, Caplan told New Scientist. Its like a bullet punching through cotton candy.

But heres the key: In a standard impactand this would apply to most of the moons cratersthe ring of material ejected at impact would pile up at a shallower angle than that ejected by a mini primordial black hole. This steep ejecta blanket is a critical signature.

Caplan and Yalinewich write that primordial black hole craters ought to be at least a meter across, within the resolution of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Of course, the moon is not lacking for craters. So, the pair suggest training a machine learning algorithm to scour orbiter images of the moons surface for just the right ones.

Even then, the work isnt over. Some craters with steep ejecta blankets arent of exotic origins. Final confirmation would require future missions to sample lunar regolith and look for silica and quartz fused by the extreme conditions in such an impact.

Still, its not certain wed find anything.

Even if all dark matter were explained by mini primordial black holes, Caplan and Yalinewich calculate the odds of a lunar impact at 10 percent. So, the real likelihood is lower than that. Also, although they estimate such craters would last a billion years on the moon before being erased by time and showers of meteorites, Purdues David Minton questioned that numbersuggesting it might be more on the order of just 13 million years.

Yalinewich agreed, but countered that the ejecta itself should last longer and still be identifiable. And there are other well-preserved surfaces in the solar system. Future missions could look for evidence of mini primordial black hole impacts on Mercury, Mars, Pluto, or rocky moons in the outer solar system.

If you look at the combined surface area of all these, Yalinewich said, you should expect at least one of these exotic craters to appear.

Image Credit: Nicolle R. Fuller/NSF

More:

Scientists Model What Would Happen if a Mini Black Hole Punched Through the Moon - Singularity Hub

Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesnt exist outside the minds of the people who use it.

But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents believed reality is fundamentally mathematical. More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously.

As I argue in a new paper, mathematics is an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world.

Bees in hives produce hexagonal honeycomb. Why?

According to the honeycomb conjecture in mathematics, hexagons are the most efficient shape for tiling the plane. If you want to fully cover a surface using tiles of a uniform shape and size while keeping the total length of the perimeter to a minimum, hexagons are the shape to use.

Charles Darwin reasoned that bees have evolved to use this shape because it produces the largest cells to store honey for the smallest input of energy to produce wax.

The honeycomb conjecture was first proposed in ancient times, but was only proved in 1999 by mathematician Thomas Hales.

Heres another example. There are two subspecies of North American periodical cicadas that live most of their lives in the ground. Then, every 13 or 17 years (depending on the subspecies), the cicadas emerge in great swarms for a period of around two weeks.

Why is it 13 and 17 years? Why not 12 and 14? Or 16 and 18?

One explanation appeals to the fact that 13 and 17 are prime numbers.

Imagine the cicadas have a range of predators that also spend most of their lives in the ground. The cicadas need to come out of the ground when their predators are lying dormant.

Suppose there are predators with life cycles of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 years. What is the best way to avoid them all?

Well, compare a 13-year life cycle and a 12-year life cycle. When a cicada with a 12-year life cycle comes out of the ground, the 2-year, 3-year, and 4-year predators will also be out of the ground, because 2, 3, and 4 all divide evenly into 12.

When a cicada with a 13-year life cycle comes out of the ground, none of its predators will be out of the ground, because none of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 divides evenly into 13. The same is true for 17.

It seems these cicadas have evolved to exploit basic facts about numbers.

Once we start looking, it is easy to find other examples. From the shape of soap films, to gear design in engines, to the location and size of the gaps in the rings of Saturn, mathematics is everywhere.

If mathematics explains so many things we see around us, then it is unlikely that mathematics is something weve created. The alternative is that mathematical facts are discovered: not just by humans, but by insects, soap bubbles, combustion engines, and planets.

But if we are discovering something, what is it?

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato had an answer. He thought mathematics describes objects that really exist.

For Plato, these objects included numbers and geometric shapes. Today, we might add more complicated mathematical objects such as groups, categories, functions, fields, and rings to the list.

Plato also maintained that mathematical objects exist outside of space and time. But such a view only deepens the mystery of how mathematics explains anything.

Explanation involves showing how one thing in the world depends on another. If mathematical objects exist in a realm apart from the world we live in, they dont seem capable of relating to anything physical.

The ancient Pythagoreans agreed with Plato that mathematics describes a world of objects. But, unlike Plato, they didnt think mathematical objects exist beyond space and time.

Instead, they believed physical reality is made of mathematical objects in the same way matter is made of atoms.

If reality is made of mathematical objects, its easy to see how mathematics might play a role in explaining the world around us.

In the past decade, two physicists have mounted significant defenses of the Pythagorean position: Swedish-US cosmologist Max Tegmark and Australian physicist-philosopher Jane McDonnell.

Tegmark argues reality is just one big mathematical object. If that seems weird, think about the idea that reality is a simulation. A simulation is a computer program, which is a kind of mathematical object.

McDonnells view is more radical. She thinks reality is made of mathematical objects and minds. Mathematics is how the universe, which is conscious, comes to know itself.

I defend a different view: the world has two parts, mathematics and matter. Mathematics gives matter its form, and matter gives mathematics its substance.

Mathematical objects provide a structural framework for the physical world.

It makes sense that Pythagoreanism is being rediscovered in physics.

In the past century physics has become more and more mathematical, turning to seemingly abstract fields of inquiry such as group theory and differential geometry in an effort to explain the physical world. As the boundary between physics and mathematics blurs, it becomes harder to say which parts of the world are physical and which are mathematical.

But it is strange that Pythagoreanism has been neglected by philosophers for so long. I believe that is about to change. The time has arrived for a Pythagorean revolution, one that promises to radically alter our understanding of reality.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: geralt / 23640 images /Pixabay

See the original post:

Humans Didn't Invent Mathematics, It's What the World Is Made Of - Singularity Hub

Progress in quantum computing is no longer just about how big your chip is. But IBM has taken a major leap forward with the release of a 127-qubit processor.

Milestones in quantum computing are getting increasingly difficult to asses as the variety of technologies and the yardsticks used to judge them proliferate. While both IBM and Google build their devices out of superconducting qubits, differences in the way theyre wired up mean you cant simply compare them qubit to qubit.

Further muddying the waters, trapped-ion computers made by IonQ and Honeywell can implement quantum circuits using far fewer qubits than superconducting systems. IBM has come up with esoteric metrics like quantum volume and CLOPS to help compare notes between different technologies, but so many variables feed into a quantum computers performance that picking a winner is tough.

Nonetheless, more qubits is definitely a good thing. And with its latest processor IBM has nearly doubled the number it can fit on a single chip, which could allow researchers to run significantly larger and more complex circuits.

We anticipate that, with Eagle, our users will be able to explore uncharted computational territory, the processors developers wrote in a blog announcing the new chip.

To be clear, the device is still not able to provide so-called quantum advantagethe ability to perform tasks no conventional hardware could. But IBM says its the first of its processors that is so large its impossible to simulate the devices quantum state on a normal supercomputer.

And building a chip with this many qubits is a significant technical feat, which IBM says will lay the groundwork for its 433-qubit Osprey processor, due in 2022, and the 1,121-qubit Condor slated for 2023. If all goes according to plan, the company thinks those devices could well start solving previously intractable problems.

We believe that we will be able to reach a demonstration of quantum advantagesomething that can have practical valuewithin the next couple of years. That is our quest, IBMs director of research, Dario Gil, told Reuters.

The key to squeezing all those qubits into one chip was a 3D packaging technique that allows control electronics and qubits to be placed on different levels. And unlike earlier processors, which required a separate set of control and readout electronics for each qubit, the new chip uses readout multiplexing to use the same kit to address multiple qubits.

The chip also uses a hexagonal layout that IBM says reduces the potential for errors by minimizing unwanted interactions between neighboring qubits. But the so-called heavy-hex setup does this by sacrificing connectivity between qubits, which makes implementing circuits more complicated.

How the chip actually performs has yet to be revealed. IBM told Fortune it has yet to benchmark the processors performance, and couldnt say how long its qubits could maintain their quantum states or to what extent they could be entangled. This refers to a quantum phenomena where the state of multiple qubits become intertwined, which is an important source of quantum computers power.

IBMs announcement was also upstaged just a day later when startup QuEra came out of stealth and announced it had built a 256-qubit device. The companys technology relies on neutral atoms that are held in place and cooled to just above absolute zero by lasers. The approach is less well-developed than those being pursued by other companies, but comes with a number of benefits.

Unlike superconducting, atoms are all identical, so theres no chance of manufacturing defects. And unlike trapped ions, they can be packed tightly together to achieve densities similar to the transistors on a late 1990s CPU. They also hold their quantum states for a long time and can become highly entangled.

QuEras device is a quantum simulator rather than a computer, though. That means it can be used to model certain physical phenomena, but it isnt a general-purpose device that can run all kinds of algorithms. According to the companys website, it is working on a fully programmable 64-qubit device that is coming soon.

Picking which of these announcements is the bigger deal is hard at this stage. But both demonstrate the rapid innovation and growing scale in the quantum hardware space.

Image Credit: IBM

Excerpt from:

IBM's 127-Qubit Eagle Is the Biggest Quantum Computer Yet - Singularity Hub

The first electric plane took flight in 1973. There was just one person on board and the plane only stayed in the air for 14 minutes, but it was the beginning of an ongoing effort to power aircraft with batteries instead of fuel. Multiple companies are working on building faster, lighter, more efficient electric planes, as well as batteries to power those planesand last week an aircraft made by Rolls-Royce hit some new milestones in the industry.

Cheerily dubbed the Spirit of Innovation, the plane is part of the companys Accelerating the Electrification of Flight initiative. The seemingly precocious plane just completed its maiden flight a little over a month ago, and Rolls-Royce subsequently launched an intense flight testing phase to collect data on the performance of the aircrafts power and propulsion system, a 400kW electric powertrain they call the most power-dense propulsion battery pack ever assembled in aerospace.

Last week, the company saidin a press release, they set three new world records. First, the aircraft reached a top speed of 345.4 mph (555.9 km/h) over 1.8 miles (3 kilometers). Thats 132 mph (213 k/h) faster than the existing record. The Spirit of Innovation got up to an altitude of 9,842.5 feet (3,000 meters) in 202 seconds60 seconds faster than the existing record. And finally, the plane reached a maximum speed of 387.4 mph (623 km/h) during its flight tests, which Rolls-Royce says makes it the worlds fastest all-electric vehicle. The company is waiting on the Federal Aviation Institute to confirm and certify these claims.

Whether or not they turn out to be world records, though, its debatable how big of a step toward commercial electric flight these achievements would be. Speed is important, of coursebut the larger problem to solve is distance, or perhaps a better word is duration. Electric planes cant currently travel nearly as far or carry nearly as much weight as those that run on jet fuel. When will batteries be able to store enough energy for a plane to fly across the Atlantic carrying 200 people?

Jet fuel is far more energy-dense than even the most advanced batteries. In other words, the batteries to provide a given amount of energy will be much heavier than fuel that would provide that same amountand the weight of an aircrafts fuel is a major factor in its range. Currently, fuel accounts for about 45 percent of the total weight of a typical long-haul jet.

As Richard Anderson, who runs the Flight Research Center at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, put it, Cars need batteries to be affordable and compact, but with airplanes we dont care about cost as much, or even volume. Its weight thats critical.

Don Hillebrand, director of the Argonne Center for Transportation Research, believes batteries need to hit 1,000 watt hours per kilogram for short-haul electric flight to be feasible. Todays lithium-ion batteries go up to around 265 Wh/kg, so were looking at a four-fold improvement over our best existing technology. Last year, a British company called Oxis Energy unveiled a prototype lithium-sulfur pouch cell capable of 470 Wh/kg, and theyre aiming to reach 600 Wh/kg by 2025.

Nonetheless, it seems electric flightshort-haul or any other typeis still at least a decade away, if not more. Norway has set a target for all of its short-haul flights (those lasting an hour and a half or less) to be fully electric by 2040; its an ambitious goal given that we dont know how quickly battery technology will progress, or how other factors will impact the adoption of electric flight. Not to mention, the whole conversation around electric flight is only relevant if the energy being used to power the planes is coming from renewable sources.

Image Credit: Rolls-Royce

Read this article:

Rolls-Royce Says Its Electric Plane Just Smashed the World Record for Speed - Singularity Hub

BTS V is known for going viral among locals aka non-fans every time BTS appears for an Award show or TV performance. From his most fashion forward BBMA red carpet debut to his Grammy appearance as Guy In All Black stirring up a major social media storm, heres a look at some of the iconic viral moments of BTS Vs recent LA trip that proved he is the ultimate stan attractor.

The two-time Grammy-nominated South Korean music group, BTS, is currently in LA. The Billboards longest-charting group has already made history at American Music Awards 2021 by being the first Asian act to snag the Artist Of The Year award.

Along with a major award sweep, BTS performed twice at 2021 AMAs their Coldplay collab track My Universe and Hot 100 history maker Butter. V, aka Taehyungs red bandana look caused a Twitter storm as viewers swooned over the Singularity crooners charisma on stage.

Kim Taehyung at Harry Styles concert

Even before BTS first official appearance at the AMAs 2021, Kim Taehyung went viral on TikTok for attending Harry Styles concert.

The Stigma crooners enigmatic presence at the show compelled fans to record him instead of Styles. From Lizzo and Vs dance to What Makes You Beautiful to him holding drinks and just enjoying the concert, TikTok clips of the singer garnered hundreds of thousands of views overnight.

To top it off, TikTok fans of the BTS member also started imitating him in a viral trend holding a glass and swaying to the music.

Speaking of BTS Vs impactful presence, a fan said, Taehyungs fanboys are currently making a new trend by recreating his look from Harry Styles concert The details Taes outfit w/ mask, the cup, the flashlight on phone while vibing on music TRENDSETTER TAEHYUNG!

BTS V made fans go feral at AMAs 2021 with a red bandana look. Fans noted that along with Twitter users asking who the guy with Red Bandana is, BTS V was also the most searched idol on Google that day. Check out his outfit below.

Bangtan Boys recently performed at James Cordens famous Crosswalk concert segment. While the episode is yet to air, lucky fans who witnessed the concert live in LA went crazy over V, gushing about his real-life charming presence.

Korean media reported how the car that Kim Taehyung touched during performance also became highly sought-after.

A fan noted, V during crosswalk concert is something else. pure love!

Summarizing BTS Vs stan attractor presence, a fan pointed out, Crazy things Taehyung has got articles for this month : 1. People willing to buy the car he touched. 2. People taking photos with his cardboard. 3. Articles on his fanboys who are imitating him during the concert of Harry styles!

BTS will next be seen at their much anticipated Permission To Dance On Stage LA concert on November 27th, 7.30 PM PST. Click here for all the details.

Stream a BTS V-focused playlist below.

In other news, Encanto soundtrack: Every song in the Disney movie explored

Read more:

These viral LA moments of BTS V prove he is the ultimate stan attractor - HITC

Between a supply chain full of holes, labor shortages across various sectors of the economy, and rising inflation, its shaping up to be a somewhat chaotic holiday season. Technology cant fix all of these problemsor even most of thembut it can help get holiday shipments from point A to point B faster, cheaper, and without as many humans involved. Waymos partnership with UPS could mean some of your holiday gifts will be spending time in an autonomous truck on their way to you.

Waymo (which started out as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009 and is still held by Alphabet, but raised $2.5 billion in its first outside funding round in March of 2020) first announced a partnership with UPS in January 2020, in which Waymo Driver was used to help move packages between UPS stores in Phoenix and the UPS hub in Tempe. Waymos Chrysler Pacifica minivans drove autonomously, but trained operators were on board to monitor the vehicles.

Last week the two companies announced an expansion of their existing partnership, saying theyll start autonomous trial runs using Class 8 trucks equipped with the fifth-generation Waymo Driver. Theyll do deliveries for UPSs North American Air Freight unit between facilities in Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. Waymos initial route for its driverless cargo shipments also ran between Houston and Fort Worth, which the company said is one of the most highly utilized freight corridors in the country. The route is around 260 miles long, much of that a straight shot on Interstate 45.

A class 8 truck essentially means a really big truckone with a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (the trucks own weight plus the maximum fuel, cargo, and passengers it can carry) over 33,001 pounds. Think cement trucks, dump trucks, or big rigs like Freightliners. The driverless fleet Waymo started testing in 2020 fit into this category, as the trucks were Peterbilt 18-wheelers (decked out with cameras, lidar, and on-board computers).

Waymos technology, called Waymo Driver (the worlds most experienced driver, if the company has its way) is considered Level 4, which means it could operate without a safety driver under certain conditions (namely, good weather). But the trucks will have two people onboard: a safety driver to take over on non-highway portions of the journey, and a software technician to monitor the autonomous mode.

Waymo opened its Dallas hub in the summer of 2020 and started testing its heavy-duty autonomous trucks on Texas roads (with safety drivers on board). The trucks werent carrying commercial goods, but were loaded with weights to mimic commercial loads.

Those tests must have gone well, because in June of this year Waymo announced a partnership with transportation logistics company JB Hunt to move cargo in automated trucks, also in Texas (Texas is a popular state for driverless vehicle testing due to its extensive highway systems, mild weather, large trucking industry, and a 2017 bill that allows vehicles to operate without a driver; Waymo competitor TuSimple also has a hub in Dallas).

If all goes well with the UPS trial runs, it may not be long until our holiday packages are being shuttled all the way to our homes in trucks with no drivers. If itll ease the current burdens the workforce and supply chain are seeing, well take it.

Image Credit: Waymo

See the article here:

Your Holiday Gifts Could Be Shipped by Robot Semi, Courtesy of UPS and Waymo - Singularity Hub

Catherine Murphy is one of our great artists.Over the course of a career that began in 1971, she has never branded herself, relied on a format, worked in a series, or produced signature works, which makes her unique. She is an observational painter who does not return to the same well, which is practically unheard of in art. What further sets her work apart from other observational artists is that her paintings are both uncanny and emotionally loaded.

A doormat in winter; an open suitcase with two neatly pressed and folded shirts; two clear plastic bags filled with clothes, sitting on a broken office chair in a nondescript corner there is nothing extraordinary about Murphys subjects. And yet there is something inexplicably disturbing about her paintings and drawings. It is this aspect of her work her particularizations of the ordinary that are central to why I believe she has become an unrivaled figure in contemporary art.

As a longtime admirer of Murphys work and the author of her only monograph, Catherine Murphy (2016), with a foreword by Svetlana Alpers, once again I was bowled over by the singularity of vision she attained in her exhibition Catherine Murphy: Recent Work, at Peter Freeman, Inc. (November 12, 2021January 8, 2022). While the specificity of light and scene has been true of her work since the beginning of her career, in this exhibition of nine oil paintings and four graphite drawings she seems to have pushed into a new and ominous territory, having to do with vulnerability and aging a subject that few American artists other than Jasper Johns have addressed with any equanimity.

Formally, Murphy does a number of things that distinguish her from other observational painters. The most important is that she does not use a one-to-one scale to paint what she sees. Rather than adhering to this formula, which has been a mainstay of painting from life, she enlarges the scale, with the two largest paintings in the current exhibition measuring five-by-five feet square. By squaring everything up, she enhances the relationship between seeing and subject matter.

The relationship of subject to scale shifts from painting to painting, with Packed (2018) an overhead view of two different-colored, striped button down shirts folded neatly in a suitcase occupying a perceptual zone where we are not quite sure how far we are from the suitcase. The frontal view suggests that we are physically rather close to the shirts, as we look straight down into the suitcase.Why have we stopped to look so intently, we are apt to ask ourselves?It is in this moment of questioning that Murphys paintings reach another level. We are not simply looking into the suitcase, because the scale suggests that something else is happening. Have we just opened it or are we about to close it?

The connection between our body and what we are looking at is Murphys innovation to observational painting; she always establishes a visceral connection between viewer and subject, which, in the paintings Flight (2020) and Kitchen Door (2021), becomes fraught with the possibility of what could happen next.

In Flight, we are positioned at the top of a flight of carpeted stairs looking down at a belted, checkerboard bathrobe lying at the bottom. Compositionally, the stairs start at the paintings bottom edge, rising more than halfway up the surface, with the bathrobe just fitting in the remaining space along the top. Everything is carefully calibrated, but none of it seems contrived.

Seemingly standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at the bathrobe, we feel as if we are inside the painting. Whereas many observational painters make the viewer feel like a detached observer, possibly even a voyeur or innocent witness, Murphy pulls us into a situation while inviting us to figure out what is going on. Whose bathrobe is it? Why is it at the bottom of the landing? Is someone throwing the dirty laundry down the stairs because it is easier than carrying down a crammed hamper?

Once you see the painting in its entirety, you begin to notice other aspects of it, which further grab your attention. This is really one of Murphys masteries. She can make a fuzzy carpet look fuzzy. There is no shorthand in her paintings. Everything from the fuzziness of the carpet to its uneven color and apparent staining from use is there in the work. As we refocus and our attention shifts, this viewer at least was brought back to the possibility of falling down the stairs, of joining the sprawled bathrobe. By making everything in the painting pertinent, Murphy compels us to look all around it, placing us in a more precarious position because we have momentarily not paid attention to where we are standing.

This state of heightened consciousness also sets Murphys paintings on a different plane of apprehension and interaction. One way she achieves this is through her remarkable ability to mimic the surface of the thing that she is painting, be it fuzzy, patterned wallpaper in Prequel (2021) or the faded green leather armrests of a well-used office chair in Bags of Rags (2019), which, as a meditation on mortality and time, is one of the most powerful and quietly chilling paintings in this mesmerizing exhibition.

In Bags of Rags two large transparent garbage bags filled with clothes are piled onto a green leather office chair that has seen better days. We dont know the circumstances, which is central to our experience of the work. The chair has been pushed into a corner and we seem to be standing in front of it, contemplating what is before us.

Whose clothes are these and why have they been stuffed into plastic bags, as if they have no further use? Are they being donated to a thrift store? What about the dyed leather chair that is tinted a faded green? Just as I think Flight is about vulnerability and the fear of falling, something that concerns older people, Bags of Rags is about remnants and the obsolescence of a broken-down chair. One strength of this painting and there are many, starting with the way everything is painted is that Murphy never directs our thinking. It is the things themselves that hold our attention, even as they evoke our future.

Whether in painting or drawing, Murphy seamlessly merges the objectivity of looking closely and directly with different levels of subjectivity. Her process is always at the service of looking, and one never sees a signature flourish or mark. She is particularly sensitive to the surface feel of a thing, be it the texture of the striped cotton shirts in Packed or the mottled and perhaps bruised skin of a young womans bare legs in Head to Toe (2018).

The angle of the composition and the cropping are essential components of her inquiry, with each painting giving us a different view of a specific thing, the frontal one of the patterned back of a camouflage jacket in Camo (2020) or the four angled views shown by a surveillance camera in the tour de force graphite drawing Night Watch(2018), which replicates that eerie, otherworldly light of a camera filming the perimeter of a house at night.

I think one reason why Murphy is not more widely celebrated is that her work is neither hip nor cool. The views are not theatrical and dramatic, as they are in Edward Hopper, who was a clunky painter and great artist. Murphys paint handling is not overtly dramatic, but it is breathtaking, because she seems to able to recreate every kind of surface, from used leather to large plastic buckets filled with water, to the perforated rubber doormat in Kitchen Door (2021). If Flight conveys the fear of falling, Kitchen Door transmits the anxiety of slipping on a winter night, beginning with the moment you leave your house and step out into the world, while Night Watch is about a feeling of vulnerability and the need for protection.

Murphy depicts the doormat as a trapezoid rising from the paintings bottom edge and tilting forward. The angle of the tilt and the close-up view suggest the viewer is standing inside, about to go out. The doormats angled plane seems to be foretelling the future, as well as underscoring the anxiety one might have about falling, especially if you feel frail or vulnerable. It is this state of our physical being that Murphy speaks to. By picking a subject that is literally underfoot, and being attentive to it, and to the piled snow and stone pathway, she shatters the illusion of security that many people believe will never change. Her sensitivity to aging and the feeling of defenselessness that can flood any one of us is unique and original, especially in the current art world and its worship of signature styles, which can be seen as a misguided bulwark against time passing. The art world should do the right thing and honor Murphys greatness.

Catherine Murphy: Recent Work continues at Peter Freeman, Inc. (140 Grand Street, Manhattan), through January 8, 2022.

See original here:

Catherine Murphys Observational Paintings Find the Uncanny in the Ordinary - Hyperallergic