Eno to Einstein, Blackboard Drawings

Blackboard drawing by Albert Einstein


Blackboard drawing by Cornelia Parker

It’s hard to compete with Albert Einstein’s calculations. But if you want to see how Brian Eno and other 21st-century luminaries responded to the challenge, visit the Oxford Museum of the History of Science.

Setting out to create an exhibit around the museum’s most prized possession — a blackboard full of (relatively) simple equations that Einstein chalked up in 1931 — the curators asked scientists, artists, sports stars, actors, journalists, musicians, and politicians to sketch whatever they wished on an actual blackboard. The results are wonderfully varied: Eno drew a global map of the “Arabic singing diaspora.” The British soccer star Bobby Robson charted a complicated play. And pianist Joanna MacGregor sketched a bass line from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” that illustrates the connection “between Bach’s supersensitivity to the contemporary styles around him . . . and today’s musicians.” This collection serves a similar purpose, connecting past epiphanies to the sudden impulses of the present.

This exhibition marks the centenary of the Special Theory of Relativity and the blackboards were prepared in the early months of 2005. The result is a gorgeous exhibit about science, art, celebrity and nostalgia. So many of my favorite things.

Via the always amazing Very Short List