Paint colors spun at high speeds – Black Hole by Fabian Oefner

Swiss photographer Fabian Oefner works with the intersection of art and science. He takes perfectly-timed photos of brightly-colored paint being spun at high speeds. From the artist: 

“Black Hole” is a series of images, which shows paint modeled by the centripetal force. The setup is very simple: Various shades of acrylic paint are dripped onto a metallic rod, which is connected to a drill. When switched on, the paint starts to move away from the rod, creating these amazing looking structures.

The motion of the paint happens in a blink of an eye, the images you see are taken only millisecond after the drill was turned on. To capture the moment, where the paint forms that distinctive shape, I connected a sensor to the drill, which sends an impulse to the flashes. These specialized units are capable of creating flashes as short as a 1/40000 of a second, freezing the motion of the paint.

We’d love to watch high speed, slow-mo video of this project. See more of Fabian’s images here, and then check out his painting in magnetic ferrofluid project.

via Colossal.