I am Elke – physicist, engineer, artist, Subversive El(k)ement.
I am inspired by the aesthetics of vintage patent drawings, by Sir Roger Penrose’s handcrafted sketches, and by M.C.Escher’s art.
The quote on the blog page is part of Richard Feynman’s famous comment in a footnote in vol. 1 of The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
I am fondly remembering my high school classes in descriptive geometry and fine art. I remember doing my first physics experiments as a child: Creating rainbow-colored patterns with all kinds of glass and acrylic objects. That fascination has never ceased, and made me get a PhD in physics.
Professionally, I went from laser physics and superconductors to stainless steel research to cyber security to energy engineering to a combination of the latter. I have developed software in all of my jobs. Now I am funneling all of that experience also into art!
This blog is now mainly about physics and art – scroll down into the past for energy, cyber, and life stuff.
I am neither using AI to create images nor to help me with writing blog posts.
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Legal Info and Copyright
Please respect my copyright: don’t use my content and artwork without my consent. Each artwork is the result of many hours of research and coding. Same for my security or heat pump research. Attribution is not sufficient!
I am running an engineering consultancy with my husband. Following Star Trek terminology he is Chief Engineer and I am Science Officer. So,…
elkement.art – elkemental Force is a personal art and science blog run by Elke Stangl, Zagersdorf, Austria, c/o her consultancy punktwissen.
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I’ve come a long way
You might have ended up on elkement.art searching for hacking public key infrastructures or building a heat pump system with an ice tank.
I started this as a personal science blog in 2012, explaining physics, and pondering on my life as a business owner, and a wanderer between professional worlds – for a while working on heat pump systems for private home owners while also designing secure IT systems for large companies.
I had studied physics because I my idea of a physics was being both a Macgiver-like engineer and a philosopher thinking deep about theoretical physics, being as versatile as Douglas Hofstadter (whose GEB book was one of the most influentials things I read in formative years).
This was the original title and tag line:
Theory and Practice of Trying to Combine Just Anything
Physics versus engineering
off-the-wall geek humor versus existential questions
IT versus the real thing
corporate world’s strangeness
versus small business entrepreneur’s microcosmos,
knowledge worker’s connectedness versus striving for independence
This blog has been all over the place: Personal musings, research notes bordering on scientific publications, weird poetry – and finally visual art!
These have been the main categories on this blog:
Even more history
In older posts in the Web category, you find pointers to my “other” site, my “static” website(s), or our German blog. I kept uniting and migrating and updating anything – until 2024.
The old sites are now semi-offline, but they can still be accessed as a password-protected time capsule. I am providing the details on the 404 page of this site.
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