Physicists and artists in unique collaboration

Laocoon by Richard Deacon. Richard Deacon

Artists and particle physicists might seem unusual bedfellows. But these two very different disciplines are currently involved in a unique collaboration in Geneva.

Scientists at the European Nuclear Research centre, CERN, have teamed up with 12 of Europe’s leading contemporary artists for Signatures of the Invisible, a project which it is hoped will redefine the relationship between art and science.

The project was the brainchild of Neil Calder, head of public relations at CERN, and the British filmmaker, Ken McMullen, who is director of the project.

“I’d been concerned for a while about the growing gap between science and the arts,” Calder told swissinfo.

“I thought that art was losing its credibility because it no longer challenged or commented on the major developments in society. I thought it would be interesting to see if we could get contemporary artists to create art around how man saw his universe at this point in time,” he says.

CERN’s reason for being is to investigate what makes our universe work, where it came from and where it is going. Its raw materials are the very building blocks of life itself – potentially fertile ground for the world of art.

The Geneva-based research organisation has been joined in the project by the London Institute, one the world’s most important colleges of art and design.

The artists, who come from five countries, include Roger Ackling, Richard Deacon, Sylvie Blocher, Anish Kapoor and Bartolomeu dos Santos. In some cases, they are trying to explore new ways of seeing our universe, but on a practical level, they have been revelling in the opportunity to use techniques and materials they have not encountered before.

“They’ve been very excited to use techniques that come from the frontier activities of science,” Calder says.

“I expected the artists to be a little difficult, with extremely refined sensibilities. But they’ve been great to work with, very down to earth. I’ve been impressed with how they’ve confronted particle physics and managed to get their own handle on the subject, he adds.”

The scientists involved in the project seem to agree that the experience has helped them to see their work in a new light.

“It’s been very rewarding and enriching,” says Michael Doser, an experimental physicist from Austria.

“Artists are always confronting you and forcing you to think about the assumptions that are behind your work. They’ve taught me to be more critical of what I’m doing and maybe to come up with solutions I would not normally come up with,” Doser said in the workshop, where he is working alongside the Swedish installation artist, Monica Sand.

Doser is currently working on an experiment which could produce anti-hydrogen for the first time.

“To make anti-hydrogen, we shoot twenty million anti-protons into our apparatus in the space of a milisecond. These cause a brief explosion of particles. With the use of scintillators, we may be able to see them with the naked eye,” he explains.

“It may be just the kind of effect I’m looking for,” says Sand, whose contribution to Signatures of the Invisible will be a collection of identical boxes, each filled with materials that alter light in a different way.

Unlike other artists involved in the project, Sand has been working with physicists from CERN for a number of years.

“I am not trying to explain physics, it’s just that physics helps me to get to where I want to go,” she says. “Physicists are like detectives. They are always trying to get closer to what matter and particles are, and I use physics to get closer to my goal.”

Rather than bridling at this intrusion, the scientists at CERN have welcomed this alternative approach. “We normally do things here for pragmatic reasons, and we don’t normally think of our work in terms of aesthetics. It has made our scientists aware that there are different ways of looking at our work, and the artists’ view is just as valid,” says Neil Calder.

The finished works of art will be exhibited in London next March before moving to Geneva. The exhibition will then travel to a number of cities in Europe, the United States and Japan.

“I’m not sure it will popularise particle physics,” Calder says. “But it may make people ask questions. I hope it will act as a catalyst that will set off a reaction of interest among people who may not otherwise have had a route into particle physics.”

by Roy Probert