Animated snowflakes help tell the story of their creation

December 17, 2015

For Sarah DeGennaro and Simon Filhol, art and science are natural companions for studying one of the world’s wonders. The collaborators use a combination of illustration and programming to tell a story that is impossible to observe — the creation of snowflakes in the atmosphere.

DeGennaro, a local artist who received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2013, and Filhol, a geophysicist working on his doctorate at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center, teamed up last year to create a proposal for the Collaborative Arts Council at UAF.

“We knew we wanted to do something reflecting the intricate, yet overlooked, natural beauty of falling snow,” DeGennaro said.

From the moment a snowflake is created in the clouds to the transparent, fleeting, impermanent opportunity we have for viewing them, each has traversed a unique path through the atmosphere. In the sky, snowflakes start to grow around an object. It could be a tiny piece of dust or even a bacteria.

Using photographs, DeGennaro drew and interpreted the growth of snowflakes, working layer by layer to draw their evolving shapes. Filhol wrote a computer code to animate the drawings.

“We chose this artistic approach, as it is still not an easy task to model the growth of a snowflake,” DeGennaro said. “A model you could simply run to produce any snowflake we can observe in nature does not yet exist, but a multitude of models which have been developed tend to capture some aspects of snowflakes’ beauty by using the mathematics of fractals.”

Those attempts produce a snowflake-like shape, but many are simply unrealistic. The collaborators preferred grounding their art project on snowflakes that have actually occurred in nature to achieve realistic depictions of unique snow crystals.

The efforts of their collaboration will be projected onto the front of the University of Alaska Museum of the North as the installation “Letters from the Sky” during the campus Sparktacular event on New Year’s Eve.

The snow crystals drawn by DeGennaro were based on real snowflakes that have fallen from the sky, so it wasn’t difficult to make each one unique. For reference, the collaborators studied the snowflake photographs taken by Wilson Bentley.

During his lifetime at the turn of the 20th century, Bentley created a collection of thousands of individually photographed snowflakes using a technique he developed. It was Bentley who first observed that no one design was ever repeated.

Later, in the 1950s, physicist Ukichiro Nakaya discovered the reason, Filhol said. “Nakaya had found a way to grow snow crystals in a chamber, altering their shape by modifying temperature and moisture content," he said. "Through this discovery he realized that the uniqueness of each snowflake is the result of a unique journey through the atmosphere, as if snowflakes were, in his words, ‘letters from the sky’.”

The collaborators said they always had in mind the importance of presenting their work as a large-scale public art performance. Since we are used to seeing snowflakes as tiny things, they hope the act of enlarging them on the side of a building will give the attention and admiration these small wonders rightfully deserve.

“Placing the work outside on one of Fairbanks’ most distinctive buildings allows art and science to invade everyday life," DeGennaro said. "We like the idea of it catching many people by surprise, rather than being something a viewer must seek out.”

The installation “Letters from the Sky” will be on view from 6:30–8 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 31, at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.