Philippa Browning, Annie Carpenter, Philipp Frankel

The group have used materials sourced from the closing buildings of UMIST, including photographic negatives of technical book figures found in the old darkroom space, to take the analogy of magnetic field lines being like stretchy strings (a common teaching tool in undergraduate physics) as the starting point for a collaborative play session. Magnetic field lines behave in many ways like elastic strings, for instance, they can oscillate like a plucked guitar string, or they can stretch and build up energy which is then released as a solar flare. These field lines fill the solar wind (a constant stream of hot gas away from the Sun and into space) and are the path by which magnetic waves propagate. The resulting work is a kinetic, self-regulating exploration of the invisible interactions between the magnetic field lines, magnetic waves, and solar wind in the outer atmosphere of the Sun.