Rogue Objects is a combined studio/seminar class taught by multimedia artist Janani Balasubramanian. Students spend approximately half their time exploring ethical and cultural implications of emerging brown dwarf astrophysics with insights from feminist science studies, trans studies, critical theory, anti-colonial histories of science, and art history. The rest of the course is focused on creative experiments for the operatic film Rogue Objects, described below. No prerequisites are required other than expansive and rigorous curiosity; the course is ideal for students with interests across math, physics, astronomy, music, STS, computer science, feminist and critical race studies, history, film, performing arts, and visual arts.
Made in collaboration with the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History, Rogue Objects is an operatic film for planetaria that explores the emerging science of brown dwarfs: a newer class of in-between celestial bodies, neither planets nor stars. Brown dwarfs are primarily bright in the infrared -- a segment of the electromagnetic spectrum just outside the wavelengths of human sight -- and to observe them we, humanity, had to make the creative leap that darkness was worth looking at. Through animation, renderings from the new JWST and Gaia space telescopes, and an operatic score built from sonified light curves of nearby brown dwarfs, Rogue Objects invites audiences into the wonderful life of these objects that abound and sing in the dark.
