Paul Klee once wrote, “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” Klee believed that we focus too much on the visible world. As if in response, today artists working alongside physicists are attempting to make the invisible visible.
The artists in this chapter include some who have studied physics and are largely scientifically self-sufficient (though they may communicate occasionally with scientists), and artists with a limited knowledge of physics who collaborate with scientists. When dealing with physics, artists are often deterred by the sheer difficulty. While artists who focus on biology may use laboratories, in physics the apparatus is often too complex or even dangerous. Artists learn what they can by reading popular science books, of high enough quality that they can begin to get to grips with underlying concepts.
The artist of light: Paul Friedlander
“Jim Miller,” of the American artists’ group EyeCandy ArtWorks, wrote, “In a time when so many artists resort to bizarre and shocking gimmicks to achieve originality, I take solace in the work of Paul Friedlander and others like him. They prove that beauty still has a place in modern art.”
Paul Friedlander’s house, in a row of terraced houses in North London, is perfectly ordinary from the outside, exactly the same as the others. When he opens the door, I step into a cavernous space in which light sculptures twenty feet high pulse, sending out swirling patterns; he has cut a hole in the ceiling to transform the lower two floors into one. Friedlander himself looks like a friendly wizard, with a craggy face, a beard, and a warm smile.
His house is like a wizard’s lair. Tools, lathes, electronics, and laptops are scattered about. The room is full of multiple varieties of light sculptures, magical spinning, whirling creations.
Friedlander was “a child of the space age,” as he puts it. His mother was an artist interested in contemporary and abstract work, who frequently took him to art exhibitions, where he vividly remembers seeing kinetic sculptures as well as optical art. His father was an eminent mathematician at Cambridge, one of whose specialities was wave equations. He kept his son abreast of the latest scientific advances, thrilling him with tales of the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and discoveries in astronomy such as black holes. In the end, his father’s enthusiasm won out and Friedlander decided to study physics, which he did at the University of Sussex, from 1973 to 1976.
Two events conspired to draw him to art. A gifted student, he attracted the attention of Tony Leggett, an extraordinary teacher and physicist, who talked him through some of the problems underlying quantum mechanics, such as the ambiguous wave/particle nature of matter. Friedlander was spellbound but acutely aware of how hard these problems are; that ultimately contributed to his decision to quit physics. Meanwhile, he discovered the work of Nicolas Schöffer at a 1970 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. Schöffer, the first to include cybernetics in his work, was to Friedlander an artist of ideas rather than techniques. Friedlander continued his studies at Sussex but started doing kinetic art as a hobby.
After graduating, Friedlander spent ten years designing stage lighting while producing works of his own. His heart was not in lighting design, he says, but he “felt squeamish about the label ‘artist.’ ” Then in 1990, he had a breakthrough. He found a way of spinning string to produce wave forms—complex shapes revealing periodic wave behavior together with chaotic rhythmic variations—then blended these two motions together. At that time, chaos theory was an intriguing new topic and it seemed a good moment to launch himself as an artist who explicitly included science in his work.
The works Friedlander produced used a technique he had invented in 1983 called chromastrobic light. In this, colors change faster than the eye can see, blurring together into white light. When he shone this white light onto a rapidly moving object, like his whirling string, the string acted like a prism, separating out the colors. The spectacular display filling the front of his house is one of these—a vertical vibrating rope, reflecting the colors projected onto it like soap bubbles (see Insert). Spectators can interact with the sculpture, using sound and sensors that change the speed of the rope’s vibrations.
Friedlander had a huge solo show, Timeless Universe, at the Sala Parpalló gallery, in Valencia, Spain, in 2006. This was a response to the English physicist Ian Barbour’s contentious hypothesis that time does not exist. The Big Bang theory of the universe states that time and space exploded into existence some 13.7 billion years ago along with the universe itself. Einstein’s general theory of relativity supports the belief that time had a beginning and is part of space-time, which has four dimensions, one of time and three of space. But examining space and time in smaller and smaller dimensions requires quantum theory, according to which these four dimensions coalesce into a quantum foam in which Einstein’s general relativity theory eventually breaks down. This is what led Barbour to hypothesize that time actually doesn’t exist.
The light sculptures that make Timeless Universe form a seemingly endless stream of wave forms colored by chromastrobic light, with an algorithm ensuring that each day there is a different variety of images. This is not an interpretation or illustration of Barbour’s idea, says Friedlander, but a meditation inspired by it. His wave forms express “all possible conceivable states of the universe that govern in every detail our fates.” He goes on, “I feel that I have been true to Barbour’s ideas, since, for his mission to succeed, he has to show how all our sense of change and time passing—of the past and future being so different and the present moment special and unique—arises from an underlying timeless reality.”
Barbour agreed to participate by writing an essay for the catalogue of Friedlander’s show. However, Friedlander does not consider his interactions with Barbour as direct collaboration—rather, Barbour’s ideas stimulate him to use light sculpture as a way to visualize the invisible. Thus Friedlander’s physics-influenced art examines how an unorthodox view of nature might affect how we see the cosmos.
Quantum artist: Julian Voss-Andreae
“Only as an artist am I able to do something that feels significant to me,” says Julian Voss-Andreae. Voss-Andreae is a tall, youthful Austrian who radiates intensity of purpose. I first meet him in 2009 at a conference in Dortmund on Einstein and Picasso, although I am already familiar with his work.
Voss-Andreae completed his most conceptual piece, Quantum Man, in 2006. Eight feet tall and made up of over a hundred parallel vertical steel sheets, when viewed from the front it looks like a man, but as you move around, the man becomes invisible. Just as in quantum physics, where if an experiment is set up to detect the wave nature of an electron, then the electron will be a wave, but if the experiment is set up to demonstrate that the electron is a particle, then it will be a particle: how you look at it, that’s what it is.
5.1: Julian Voss-Andreae, Quantum Man, 2006.
Voss-Andreae understands the fundamentals of physics. At the University of Vienna, he was part of a research group under the distinguished physicist Anton Zeilinger. The group explored arcane properties such as entanglement and quantum cryptography, and called their work applied quantum philosophy. Voss-Andreae received his MSc for an experiment demonstrating that massive objects such as carbon 60 molecules (shaped like Buckminster Fuller’s hexagons, and known as Bucky balls) have quantum properties. They are the heaviest particles ever found to have such properties.
Voss-Andreae’s earliest artistic inspiration was German Expressionism, especially Der Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) groups. Their members included Wassily Kandinsky, and they showed works by Picasso and Klee in their exhibitions. Der Brücke was an early manifestation of Expressionism, using subjective experience to depict the world, while Der Blaue Reiter was one of the driving forces behind the development of abstraction in twentieth-century art. Voss-Andreae is particularly inspired by the poignantly expressive works of Picasso’s Blue and Rose Periods, which combine Expressionism and abstraction.
His interest in science arose from a very young age through popular science magazines and chemistry and electronic sets. At twelve he got his first computer and learned code. He wanted to construct an aesthetically appealing computer game. “It was then that I realized that I needed to learn mathematics as the bridge between science and art.” Five years later, he made a first attempt at computer art, writing a graphics program and modifying his needle printer to make a scanner. The result was disappointing, which he put down to the analytical manner in which he had produced it. He concluded that “probably all intellectually conjured, brain-born art is doomed to be boring and empty, a prejudice that, to this day, fuels my work: in a way all my work is an attempt to disprove this hypothesis—and to see what that secret ingredient is, beyond the purely intellectual idea, that makes the work come alive.”
Voss-Andreae exudes a strong sense of independence, of going his own way, which he attributes to his friendship with the German artist Horst Janssen, a friend of his father, who lived near his family in Hamburg. Best known for his drawings, etchings, and woodcuts, Janssen “drew without the intellect interfering, [using] the influence of the consciousness on the art.” Voss-Andreae’s desire to work without the interference of the intellect became an essential part of his art, which represents in a free-flowing manner forms best understood using highly mathematical theory.
He is “intrigued by the time when relativity and quantum physics emerged—for example, Schrödinger, Musil, Schiele, Gödel, Kafka—from the collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire,” and wonders if and how scientific and literary change related to political upheaval. He also admires van Gogh’s “honest and strong dynamic,” which revealed the static world as a “quantum dance. His sense of love as the primordial force of the universe always shines through his work.” Listening to Voss-Andreae, one cannot help sensing the German Romantic in him.
In 2000, Voss-Andreae emigrated to the United States, and studied at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, graduating in 2004. To Voss-Andreae aesthetics depends on satisfactory design. “To me, form and function are always a unit, and both together make a good design. Like in mathematics or engineering, I cannot separate the experience of discovering or understanding such a solution from a beautiful aesthetic experience.” As both an artist and a scientist, he realized that he was in a unique position to plunge into the growing movement of science-influenced art. In fact, he had been planning Quantum Man since 1999.
He is currently based in Portland, where several of his works are exhibited. Others are at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida, Rockefeller University in New York, and the American Center for Physics in Maryland. Says Voss-Andreae, “I feel a strong excitement about work that really merges art and science, and I believe that this is a sign for the emergence of a new culture. But we are only at the beginning.”
Russian mysticism meets physics:
Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand
Although they have not formally studied physics, the husband-and-wife team of Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand produces impressive works deeply based in the subject. Domnitch and Gelfand’s goal is to stimulate the senses, stir the imagination, and even touch consciousness. They produce sonic immersion environments and ask evocative questions like, “Is it possible to create a sonic rainbow? Is it possible to render the wave behaviors of sound into those of light? Is it possible to render sound visible and allow a musician to work with the shape of sonic currents?”
One of their solutions is their Camera Lucida, or light chamber. They write, “The Camera Lucida project began as a speculative reverie on observing sound waves with the naked eye”—observing sound waves, an extraordinary concept in itself. They took the audible sound from a musical composition and modulated it into the ultrasonic register, using a chamber containing liquid made up of over 90 percent sulphuric acid. The ultrasonic waves cause bubbles that implode violently, emitting light. This combination of sound and light is called sonoluminescence. Thus they create a “sonoluminescent universe,” made up of a variety of patterns which eventually fade away. They see this work as depicting the early universe, when sound waves compressed and rarefied matter, emitting light, a process that can be seen around certain black holes.
5.2: Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, Camera Lucida: Sonochemical Laboratory, 2006.
I first met Domnitch and Gelfand when I interviewed them—for six hours!—at Ars Electronica in Linz in September 2011. Domnitch has a shaved head with nothing but an S-shaped Mohican on top, while Gelfand is fashionably dressed down in cap and T-shirt. They are a handsome couple, both of Russian origin. Domnitch grew up in Minsk, while Gelfand’s family emigrated to the United States when he was a boy and he grew up in New York. They met when Domnitch was working on a PhD in philosophy at Fordham University, in the Bronx, while Gelfand was studying film at New York University.
Their partnership, they say, “came out of a series of very long philosophical discussions on the line between logic and music, between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic.” I can only imagine what these discussions were like. In my own experience, conversations with them are highly non-linear, beginning along one line, then branching along others only tangentially related and sometimes not at all. They are so in touch with each other that they finish each other’s sentences. Speaking to them is like speaking to one person.
Domnitch and Gelfand rejected the traditional ways of investigating fundamental issues in art and philosophy, feeling that “they offered no buzz.” They were fascinated by questions such as “What is light?” They wanted to go deeper than traditional ways allowed. The clue came from John Cage. Domnitch had been familiar with his work for some years before coming to New York. She arrived in 1994, two years after his death, but she and Gelfand were able to meet close friends of his who discussed him and his work and beliefs in some depth. What particularly fired Domnitch and Gelfand was Cage’s belief that “recorded music or recorded art ceases to be a real thing.” It’s stuck, frozen in time, never suffering the intervention of natural forces such as decay. In other words, while the world about us is transient, ever-changing, when it comes to recorded music or art “the narrative is too restrictive. Everything is forever.” Gelfand’s studies in film and optics offered a way to create an alternative—“live cinema,” in which scenes never repeat themselves and, in fact, can never be repeated.
In their early work, Domnitch and Gelfand projected concrete images—forms painted with black ink on 35mm slides—onto clouds of water vapor. The result was spectacular. “The image was animated like a ghost that comes to life.” In this way “art became a means, an arena to ask substantial questions.”
One of their most recent creations, Memory Vapor, is a cloud chamber set up to detect cosmic rays, the elementary particles from outer space that continually bombard the earth. Coursing through the liquid in the cloud chamber, the rays make tracks like those made by peanuts dropped into a glass of beer. Domnitch and Gelfand illuminate them using a beam of white light from a laser which enhances the trail of condensation droplets, producing an almost dizzying sensation of “iridescent depth.”
Other experiments encourage viewers to look within themselves. In 10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid they shoot laser beams into clusters of soap bubbles at just the right angles to create a projection of the molecular interactions in the bubble, giving a peacock-like display of colors as the beam splits into multiple, very fine threads. The patterns evoke the dynamics of living cells and suggest conditions in the early days of the universe. This is art as research. Exploration of the properties of soap bubbles has a long history; they are used today in modeling black holes and superstrings.
Domnitch and Gelfand have many contacts in the physics communities in St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, and Japan. Among them is Kiuchi Yasui, a leading Japanese researcher in sonoluminescence, who was struck by their Camera Lucida and, realizing that “there was no theoretical model for this behavior,” went on to propose one. Raoul Frese, a biophysicist at Vrije University in Amsterdam who explores artificial photosynthesis, became interested in a piece called Hydrogeny. In this, Domnitch and Gelfand evoke the ways in which the earliest forms of photosynthesis might have occurred in oceans. “Raoul claimed that his encounter with us and our approach to physics led him to upscale his experiments,” they say.
Domnitch recalls a physicist friend who was moved to tears by Memory Vapor. He perfectly understood the technical aspects of a cloud chamber, but in Memory Vapor he saw something beyond what one usually sees in cloud chamber events. “Aesthetics is to be emotionally moved,” Domnitch concludes.
Aesthetics is not something they put in. Rather, it has to emerge. “We always hope the unexpected will appear; this is a most important ingredient—especially in an artwork.”
Between dimensions: Nathan Cohen
“I’m an optimist,” says Nathan Cohen. “I want to see just over the horizon, try to capture the world in which we live.”
When I met Nathan Cohen in the 1990s, he was experimenting with slats of wood arranged at different angles, carefully planned in meticulously drawn sketches like scientific diagrams. I’ve always believed that an artist’s preparatory sketches, delineating his thought processes, can stand alone. Cohen’s were exemplary. In order to achieve symmetry in his constructions, he worked on graph paper, orienting each slat in relation to fixed horizontal and vertical lines—in mathematical terms, their positions relative to the x and y axes, their x- and y-coordinates.
One construction reached its final form when the coordinates of the slats were adjusted one after another in a specific way. Cohen had rediscovered a set of interchanges known in mathematics as a permutation group. Thus does an artist working in a scientific way chance upon mathematical symmetries.
For Cohen, art runs in the family. His father, Bernard Cohen, is an eminent British abstract artist and former Slade professor at University College London, while his uncle, Harold Cohen, is a pioneer of computer art. From an early age Nathan loved to draw and often went to art museums, such as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. There were frequent trips to New Mexico, an area that his father found particularly inspiring. There he became entranced with rocks and minerals. “I almost became a geologist,” he recalls. In the end he opted for art, but he always looked for ways to include science in his artistic research.
Cohen studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he sought out scientists for conversations and developed a keen interest in collaboration. Why not, he thought, “look for ways to share a common understanding?” Over the years he has found that artist and scientist “need to be sensitive to the needs of the other.” He describes this relationship as “ongoing and organic.” Process is of the essence.
In 2006 Cohen started working with Japanese scientists at the Graduate School of Media Design at Keio University, in Tokyo. He works with a team of researchers seeking ways to blur the distinction between the real and virtual worlds, trying to represent “that space which exists between two and three dimensions,” examining the conundrum “Where does the picture end and the real world begin?”
He plays with light, shining it on geometrical constructions or placing a light in the construction itself, or projecting digitally onto three-dimensional constructions or onto the floor or walls. The constructions are beautifully made, so precisely machined that sometimes they seem to float. Cohen wants the viewer to see them as “part of the real world, the viewer’s world.” When a person walks between the projector and the image, they’re picked up by a sensing device, giving a second level of imagery and apparently creating extra dimensions, as in his Interactive RPT Wall Installation.
5.3 (a): Nathan Cohen, Interactive RPT Wall Installation (2008), Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (without projection).
5.3 (b): Nathan Cohen, Interactive RPT Wall Installation (2008), Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (detail with projection).
Cohen’s constructions express his concept of aesthetics: “finding patterns in what we see, enjoying or being disturbed by (im)balance and (dis)harmony that can be evinced by symmetrical and asymmetrical arrangements of elements, and the construction of forms where the reading of the elements that compose them are spatially ambiguous and yet clearly defined.”
He believes that his collaboration with Japanese scientists “has made possible new ways of creating artworks which challenge the way we perceive our environment.” The lab’s director, Susumu Tachi, spoke of his interest in bringing together “technology and fine art,” which will require “a new integration of advanced technology and art.” Both artist and scientist clearly benefited from this collaboration.
In 2012 Cohen initiated an MA course in art and science at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, in London, the first such program in the UK. The aim of the program is to teach students to build a common ground and learn to communicate with scientists, to “make a journey toward understanding where the other person comes from.” To do this, Cohen takes students into laboratories. He believes that this is important in fostering art and science collaborations. “There is nothing new here,” he stresses. “The history of Renaissance art was primed by mathematics and physiology. There should necessarily be a science/art continuum.”
Drawing with light from the stars: Tim Roth
Tim Roth and Robert (Bob) Fosbury’s spectacular art installation From the Distant Past used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to evoke the “heartbeat of the primordial universe.”
Roth is a light artist who is interested in what light and color can tell us about the universe. In an exhibition at the Kunstfassade in Munich, in 2004, he used light panels on a building and arranged for them to be set off by light captured by telescopes on the earth and in space, as well as triggered by events from particle accelerator facilities. The matrix, driven by the macro- and microcosms, blinked on and off in dazzling colors.
Roth is an imposing figure, broad-shouldered and tall, whose loose-fitting suits make him seem even bigger, and who wears his hair swept back in a braid. He is German but speaks excellent English, liberally sprinkled with “cool.” His route to art was indirect. Although he always had an affinity for the sciences, he studied philosophy and politics at the university in Tübingen and had an avid interest in photography. He obtained a degree in visual communication from the University of Art and Design in Kassel.
In 2009, Roth was a guest artist at the headquarters of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, near Munich. There he met the astrophysicist Bob Fosbury, at the time head of the European coordinating facility of the Hubble Space Telescope. Fosbury was eager to present astronomical data in an artistic way but had never had the opportunity until he met Roth.
The Hubble Space Telescope is akin to a time machine. It tells us what the universe was like ten billion years ago, when it was a mere three billion years old. Instruments on Hubble separate the light it receives from objects in the universe into their constituent colors, each of which carries characteristics of certain chemical elements. In this way Hubble puts together the fingerprint of the stars that are being observed, revealing what they are made of.
In 2010, Roth and Fosbury made their presentation in Venice, projecting the jagged curve of these data—similar to a chart of the day’s trading on Wall Street—in a line of bright green laser light onto the façade of the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti. They called it From the Distant Past. As Fosbury puts it, the squiggly green line, which looked uncannily like a cardiogram, held “symbolic meaning—it was the ‘heartbeat of the universe.’ ”
Fosbury was delighted at this eye-catching way to represent scientific data while avoiding technical details. People who saw From the Distant Past realized that they were seeing light from billions of years ago as well as evidence of what these hugely distant, very ancient stars, most likely long since blown to smithereens, were made of. Although his collaboration with Roth did not affect his day-to-day work, it made Fosbury aware of ways to present knowledge about the universe that would spark people’s imagination.
5.4: Tim Roth in collaboration with Bob Fosbury, From the Distant Past, 2010.
Since 2011 Roth has also collaborated on From the Distant Past with Antonella Nota of the European Space Agency, who is the Hubble Space Telescope project scientist and mission manager at Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), as well as with Ken Sembach who is mission head from STScI. Nota bewails the lack of awe today in those dealing with astronomical data. In the past, she says, astronomers used to sit alone at their telescopes, “observing the night sky on top of a mountain [and] would breathe amazement. Now the data arrives directly to your computer screen.” Collaborating with Roth allowed her “to reestablish an equilibrium I had partially lost, to appreciate in a deeper way the beauty of the data I am working on. It has reinforced that my role, as a scientist, is not only to find the answer, but to communicate the same sense of wonder to all people.”
Glimpsing the universe: Vanessa Harden
Vanessa Harden is a woman with a sense of humor. Her multifarious projects include guerrilla gardening, which involves her and her coconspirators planting flowers secreted in a false-bottomed briefcase into unadorned earth in traffic islands and other neglected public places. Another of her design experiments is a GPS chastity belt—the ultimate antirape device—which activates an electric circuit in the garment and locks it when the wearer enters an area she has previously classified as dangerous. It is, of course, more conceptual than practicable.
In person Harden is ebullient and always flamboyantly dressed. She is a fashion designer, among much else. Harden, who is Canadian, studied at Ontario College of Art and Design, then at the MIT Media Lab and the Royal College of Art in the Design Interactions group, which is where she realized that she wanted to “interpret science with design.” At the RCA she had the chance to work with the synthetic biology group, but opted for a different sort of design.
Harden’s knowledge of physics derives almost exclusively from conversations with physicist collaborators, to which she responds by creating works of art. Her work bears seriously on science, however; it is not just free creation. In 2009, she was approached by a group of astrophysicists based at Imperial College London, to participate in a project designed to put across certain astrophysical concepts and phenomena. Harden came up with a name for the project: Urban Sputnik. The idea was to use the scientists’ knowledge of physics and Harden’s design experience to devise something that would connect people in a sensory way with “distant cosmological phenomena that cannot otherwise be directly perceived nor experienced on a human scale.”
Andrew Jaffe was one of the astrophysicists involved. The scientists’ role, he says, “was crucial throughout the project, from the original ideas for topics to the final design, as well as in writing the explanatory notes.” The scientists saw Harden’s role as translating their ideas into art, a venture requiring hours of labor. The collaboration, says Jaffe, “enabled/forced me to think about some of my ideas more visually than previously, as well as being forced to describe them to Vanessa.” It has certainly impacted on his teaching and his public lectures though, as far as his own research goes, “I think the effect has been minimal.”
5.5: Vanessa Harden, Shape of the Universe, 2011.
The result of the collaboration was an exhibition, Urban Sputnik: Interactive Cosmology, which excited a lot of interest, with events at both arts and science venues, including the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Institution in London. One of the exhibits—Shape of the Universe—is a “saddle” of beaten copper which represents the curved structure of four-dimensional space-time. Viewers can actually touch it and peer through a magnifying glass to see our solar system, a minute dot in the immensity of space-time.
Cosmology is my theme: Josiah McElheny
Josiah McElheny’s spectacular glass and chrome installations represent nothing less than the entire universe. When An End to Modernity was shown at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea, New York, in 2005, it generated acres of admiring coverage. The New York Times described it as “The Entire Universe on a Dimmer Switch.”
5.6: Josiah McElheny, An End to Modernity, 2005.
The sculpture, a gigantic starburst of 1,000 blown-glass orbs and some 5,000 rods, mostly of chromed aluminum at least 3 feet long, is some 14 feet across and 12 feet high. It represents the explosion of space 13.7 billion years ago. The length of the rods is proportional to the time duration since the Big Bang, while the glass spheres represent galaxies at the corresponding moment with lamps representing quasars. It hangs at eye level, with the bottom of the work just six inches above the floor. It’s majestic and also incredibly fragile. It looks as if the slightest touch could shatter it.
McElheny is a glassblower by training. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, then with a master glassblower in Sweden, and won a MacArthur “genius” grant. He is intrigued by the concept of reflections and was inspired by a series of conversations in 1929 between the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the designer and thinker Buckminster Fuller, in which they discussed reflective sculptures in a reflective space, in which no shadows would be cast, making it totally self-enclosed, a perfectly formed utopian environment. McElheny’s response was to explore how “the act of looking at a reflective object could be connected to the mental act of reflecting on an idea.”
Then in 2000, he noticed the striking spiky modernist cut-glass chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. It occurred to him that they had been made around 1965, when Penzias and Wilson at Bell Labs found astounding evidence to support the hypothesis that our universe came into being with a Big Bang, and struck him as the perfect way to depict it. But he didn’t just want to illustrate it. He wanted to get the science right.
Everything fell into place in 2004 when he approached the cosmologist David Weinberg, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University and author of the “Dark Matter rap,” a rap which Weinberg recorded, all about the wonder and strangeness of dark matter, the mysterious substance which physicists hypothesize constitutes 85 percent of the total matter of the universe.
The two immediately bonded. They met frequently and Weinberg gave tutorials to McElheny. McElheny recalls that “David’s view of cosmology is closer to an artist’s view”—that is, highly visual. It was a “two-way dialogue in which Weinberg learned about issues facing the artist.”
The result was An End to Modernity, followed by a succession of other enormously successful works on similar themes. Island Universe was exhibited in the White Cube Gallery in Hoxton, in London’s arty East End, and in prestigious galleries around the world. It is a collection of five glass and chrome starburst sculptures, each representing a different model of the cosmos and other potential universes. As in An End to Modernity, McElheny collaborated with Weinberg and was scrupulously careful to create a scientifically accurate model.
Says Weinberg, “More people saw Island Universe in one day in Madrid than have ever read my Astrophysical Journal articles.” I met Weinberg some years ago when I gave a lecture at the astrophysics department at Ohio State. I was struck by his interest in the humanities, particularly in art, which is unusual for a physicist. Though he says that the effect of his collaboration with McElheny on his research is small, since the “big gap in technical level makes it hard for the art to affect the science,” he found that it affected his day-to-day activities, such as teaching, lecturing, and helping him to see his scientific work “in a broader cultural perspective, as part of a long intellectual tradition.” The collaboration spurred him to read writings on the cosmos written many centuries ago, as well as current studies relating this work to modern theories such as the multiverse. The works he collaborates on with McElheny draw on ideas from historical figures with whom he was not previously familiar. Thus, intellectually speaking, their collaboration has been mutually beneficial.
Despite the hard work and time he has put into his collaboration with McElheny, a time equal to the length of time he has spent on his own research, Weinberg is not credited as the co-creator of the sculptures. This is a delicate as well as a contentious area. Scientists expect to have their name on works resulting from collaborations. After all, if there were no science, there would be no art. But this is not as straightforward as it seems. Weinberg knew from the start that only McElheny’s name would appear on the finished work. “This was the deal,” he says, “not that we ever discussed it—and I decided it was okay. In the end, I got quite a bit more recognition out of it than I initially expected.” However, he continues, “my colleagues are sometimes miffed on my behalf that I am not listed as the co-creator of the sculptures.”
Collaboration: a personal perspective
In 2008 I gave a lecture at the Wellcome Collection on the mural Picasso painted in 1950 in London—known as Bernal’s Picasso—which they had recently acquired. At the dinner afterward, I met the artist Fiorella Lavado. She was looking for a scientist to collaborate with. She had no scientific background but was an avid reader of science articles in newspapers and periodicals such as New Scientist, and also read serious popularizations of science.
In her mid-thirties, Lavado was born in Lima, Peru. She studied audiovisual communication, then worked in advertising and documentaries and eventually focused on graphic design. She also studied with the Spanish performance and video artist José Luis Arbulú and the German neo-Expressionist painter, printmaker, and sculptor Ralf Winkler, alias A. R. Penck—a bête noire of the East German regime—which lent an edge to her work. She had lived in Germany, then moved to London at around the time we met.
Lavado is striking, with springy black hair, a sparkling personality, and the ability to get things done. When we met, her work consisted mainly of weaving, using ultrathin stainless steel wire in layers to create objects of various shapes and sizes, often spherical. One of her creations was like a representation of a black hole, going beyond the usual scientific visualizations drawn by artists from mathematical models. It is seven centimeters across. Lavado wove it from the inside out using a single strand of wire, spun into many layers with an indentation in the middle.
We decided to collaborate on a joint project which we entitled Weaving the Universe: From Atoms to Stars. We already had one completed object: the black hole. The problem was how to transform it into something that could evoke the frightening grandeur and poetry behind an object in the heavens of such incredible size—trillions of miles across—and awesome power. We found a way to communicate all this using Adobe Photoshop. In the resulting image, the wire sphere is transformed into a massive engine, spinning and spewing out the light generated by captured gas molecules. The wire texture adds to the mystery as it hovers in the darkness of deep space.
Our first exhibition was at the Benaki Museum in Athens in September 2009, in a program celebrating the international year of astronomy. There we showed the original black hole and other depictions of astronomical objects: a wormhole and a planetary nebula. We also gave a talk explaining how our collaboration worked.
We exhibited the same works at the Royal Astronomical Society in London in February 2010 and again gave a talk. For the first time that anyone could remember, the monthly RAS meeting was attended by artists. Other invitations to lecture arrived and we always took along the miniature black hole.
Shortly afterward, we were invited to exhibit at the famous Schering Gallery in Berlin in October 2010. Previously we had shown only half of our proposed project; the full concept included atoms as well as stars. For this show Lavado wanted to find a way to depict the wave/particle duality of light and matter, where an electron can be both a wave and a particle at the same time. After much discussion, she created a floor-to-ceiling sculpture consisting of many strands of stainless steel wire, each of which is alternately made up of wavy sections and solid clumps, which, when viewed together, form a tapestry evoking waves and particles blending into each other. We called the work Anschaulichkeit (Visualizability), a term coined by the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who pondered the way in which we form images of the world and what these images have to do with science, in this case the quantum world.
These were not conceptual artworks capable of many interpretations, so I thought we needed explanatory text to make their meanings clear. With quantum physics text is indispensable, because it’s so hard to imagine or understand. Most unlikely of all is the wave/particle duality. The text for Anschaulichkeit, however, was not as helpful as it could have been because the gallery placed restrictions on the amount of text that could be displayed so that what I had originally written was severely edited—an example of how galleries may have to rethink their rules when it comes to artsci.
5.7: Fiorella Lavado, Anschaulichkeit, 2010.
The exhibition at the Schering Gallery marked the completion of our project. Sadly, our collaboration had already begun to break down in ways that seem to be common when artists and scientists work together. A number of issues arose, such as the independence of the artwork from the science. I have always felt that without the science there can be no artwork. Sometimes, however, the artist begins to believe that the scientist has simply given them a gift of information and knowledge.
The tipping point was the same realization that struck David Weinberg when he collaborated with Josiah McElheny. My name appeared only once, beneath the title of the exhibition. Only Lavado’s name was on the many artworks, even though the work could not have been created without my scientific input. I have discussed this with other artists and scientists. We concluded that an agreement should be drawn up beforehand stating that the project is a total collaboration and that both names should appear on each work.
I can’t imagine how our collaboration could influence scientific research, but nevertheless it was an interesting attempt to visualize highly counterintuitive phenomena in a way that is aesthetic and could also be inspirational. The effects worked both ways. I became more sensitive in dealing with concepts of aesthetics and beauty, and the collaboration opened new vistas for Lavado. It was also a helpful learning experience, enabling me to look at artsci from the point of view of a practitioner as well as of a writer.
Art at CERN
The Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) was founded in 1954 as a United Nations for science, another way to unite Europe in the wake of World War II. It has been a phenomenal success. Originally there were twelve member states. There are now eighteen, all from the European Union. At present there are some 10,000 visiting scientists from over 600 universities, and over 100 different nationalities working there. In addition to CERN’s scientific achievements, there have been momentous technological spinoffs, such as the creation of the World Wide Web.
A highlight of the CERN day is lunch at the cafeteria, where scientists huddle, discussing the nature of matter, the number of dimensions in the universe, or why we are here, oblivious to the stunning backdrop of the snowcapped Alps. In recent years the public, too, has become engrossed in news from CERN. In pubs and restaurants, people discuss reports of neutrinos found to travel faster than light, shedding doubt on Einstein’s relativity theory, though in fact those particular data turned out to be incorrect. Then came the buzz over CERN’s discovery of the Higgs boson: what it is and what it means.
There has also been a huge amount of interest in CERN from the art community. As Renilde Vanden Broeck, CERN’s senior press officer, tells me, CERN “always welcomed artists [but] the thing was unorganized until Ken McMullen,” the distinguished independent filmmaker, arrived on the scene. McMullen’s movies are grounded in history, psychoanalysis, and literature, and have been described as painterly and theatrical. 1867, based around Manet’s painting of the execution of the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico, is a deconstruction in time, space, and memory of the eleven months Manet labored over the work and the events surrounding the execution, while 1871 pivots on the violence of the 1871 commune and the writings of Émile Zola. Cinema plus Psychoanalysis = the Science of Ghosts, based on the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s suggestion of a link between cinema and psychoanalysis, is a cinema verité in which Derrida plays himself conversing with the actress Pascale Ogier. In the 1970s, McMullen made a film featuring the German artist Joseph Beuys, who uses science in his work, and this inspired his interest in science.
Trained in painting at Liverpool University and then at the Slade in London, McMullen decided to swap brush for camera while keeping his fine art background in mind. There was no difference between making a film and painting a picture, he tells me. In the late 1990s he was living in Paris and dating the actress Irène Jacob. Her father, Maurice, was a theoretical physicist at CERN and invited him to visit. Many of the physicists there had seen his films. Then in 1997 McMullen became a professor at the London Institute, an umbrella organization covering the major London art schools. The rector asked him to find a scheme to boost the rating of the institute so that it would receive more government funding. McMullen contacted Jacob, who suggested he approach the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council in London. McMullen’s idea was to take a group of art students to CERN to make a film that would be “not merely art as illustration; it would embody physics concepts into the art world.” The London Institute suggested that instead of students, McMullen should look for artists with international reputations.
McMullen invited the artists Roger Ackling, Jerôme Basserode, Sylvie Blocher, Richard Deacon, Patrick Hughes, Paola Pivi, Tim O’Riley, Monica Sand, and Bartolomeu dos Santos, and the scientists John March-Russell, Stephan Russenschuck, Michael Doser, John Ellis, Helenka Przysieniak, and Hans Drevermann. Along with Maurice Jacob, they all met at CERN in December 1999. They spent the morning touring the complex, wandering through the tunnels, riding the monorails, visiting experiments, and learning about the CERN workshops. In the afternoon, each gave a brief talk. “The effect is spellbinding and the thing is begun,” Michael Benson, director of communications at the London Institute, wrote in his diary. He told the CERN Courier, “Artists today are beginning to realize that science provides fertile territory for the imagination.”
During the following year, the artists returned to CERN from time to time to consult with their scientist collaborators. The result was an exhibition entitled Signatures of the Invisible, which opened in London’s Atlantis Gallery on March 1, 2001. The press release described its overall aim:
The laws of physics are not going to go away, although these laws are no longer intuitive—relativity, antimatter, quantum mechanics are how Nature works. Sooner or later the artists will have to confront the challenge of representing and commenting on these foundations of human life. Never has there been a better opportunity as the new media of video and computer graphics, again direct spinoffs of physics research, give new possibilities for presenting apparently abstruse scientific concepts.
Luciano Maiani, director general of CERN, wrote, “Signatures of the Invisible is a groundbreaking initiative. For the first time researchers at the leading edge of current work in two apparently different, unrelated fields—contemporary art and high energy physics—have worked together.” Emmanuel Grandjean wrote in Tribune de Genève, “There is fusion in the air at CERN. [CERN] attempts the marriage of art and science.”
McMullen emphasized the unique collaborative aspect of the exhibition. It was, he says, “not a straightforward illustrative sci-art project but a free flow of ideas.” Many spectacular works were produced, including engravings depicting particle collisions, installations using nonradioactive lead from the Roman era, metal sculpture created in collaboration with workshop technicians, computer art, printmaking, fashion drawings, and video art.
The sculptor Richard Deacon, famous for his abstract works created using everyday materials, was struck by the vast size of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) compared to the microscopic nature of the Higgs boson, which it was designed to catch—rather like a Tibetan ghost trap, a wooden frame crisscrossed with threads, trying to capture an invisible entity. He built a “particle accelerator” out of plaster and Sainsbury’s plastic bags, describing it as “a kind of archetype.”
Patrick Hughes creates three-dimensional illusions which seem to move as you walk in front of them. He has been described as a painter of paradoxes rooted in perceptions. He was struck by the array of instruments at CERN that seem to open doors onto nature. To represent them he painted instruments on six panels which open to reveal a view of the Alps as the viewer walks by.
Monica Sand was interested in particle physics, the trapping and absence of light. Physics represents light as a continuous glow, a field of light like a field of grass. Sand called her work Maxwell’s Field, in reference to the great nineteenth-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who discovered the equations for electricity, magnetism, and light. To represent the field of light she used an array of boxes, into which she slid panels made of material from particle detectors at CERN, and “black glass” to stop light passing through. “The mathematical, the simple, and the complex are hidden in the world you are invited to contemplate,” she writes.
The late Bartolomeu dos Santos was a larger-than-life Portuguese artist. Of considerable girth, he exuded good humor and deep thoughts on art, as I recall him on the many occasions we met at University College London. He worked in the printed image, and at CERN was fascinated by the whiteboards covered in equations, like hieroglyphics, which he saw as maps to the unknown. Once an equation has been written, it exists forever, even if it is erased. He wrote on one of his works the words, “Ne pas effacer.” (Do not erase.)
The French sculptor and installation artist Jerôme Basserode was struck by the way physics incorporates past, present, and future, and the relative nature of time as one turns into the next. To represent this he used several huge spinning tops, machined in the CERN workshops, inscribed with the words “past,” “present,” and “future.” Visitors see the tops slowly rotating past, taking time along with them.
McMullen produced seven works which, along with dos Santos’s piece, were less illustrative of physics and more to do with “signatures of the invisible,” in line with the exhibition’s aim. In Skin Without Skin, McMullen considered what would happen if you took a piece of paper, drew parallel lines on it, then crumpled it up into a three-dimensional shape, like a relief map of mountains and valleys. He did this several times. Each crumpled paper came out different even though he applied the same amount of force. The theoretical physicist John March-Russell commented that the uniqueness of each crumpled paper was analogous to the assertion, in quantum theory, that the act of measuring alters the system which is being measured so that we never know the system itself, only the system plus the measuring device. “There can never be a ‘quantum Xerox machine,’” March-Russell writes. McMullen realized that the magic of the crumpled papers was that we perceived them differently depending on how they were illuminated; the crumpled paper (the system) had no meaning until it was illuminated by light (the measuring device). By now he had taken to referring to each piece of lined, crumpled paper as a “crumple theory.” With the help of Ian Sexton, a CERN craftsman, he scanned a crumpled paper in the super high-tech laser scanner, scaled it up to nine feet long by three feet wide, then cast it in three stainless steel segments. Using lasers, Sexton sliced the stainless steel segment into thin plates that slotted into a horizontal base. The result was like a mountain range put through an egg slicer. There were different shadows and textures depending on the light; slices seemed to disappear in the same way that measurements in quantum physics occur. Skin Without Skin resulted from a collaboration between an artist, a physicist, and a technician. In 2001, the Chinese government awarded it a prize for outstanding work in art and science.
Among other work which McMullen showed in Signatures of the Invisible is ?Lumen de Lumine, an eight-minute video of a woman in a cadmium red dress standing in a steel circle—a cross-section of an old accelerator at CERN. She swings a cord with a lit 60-watt bulb at the end over her head, slowly letting out the cord. At first she is in control of the lightbulb, but as the cord becomes longer, it becomes more difficult to control. Soon it is controlling her and she sways rhythmically to keep her balance. Her difficulty in controlling the bulb is a metaphor for the collisions and near misses as millions of particles whip around the accelerator at speeds near that of light. McMullen then reversed the image and ran it next to the original, suggesting the beams of particles flying in opposite directions around the circular accelerator and further emphasizing near misses. In some versions the woman recites Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” in German, the language of Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, pioneers of the quantum revolution. ?Lumen de Lumine is also a meditation on the solitude deep underground in an abandoned tunnel. The light emanating from the whirling lightbulb, a metaphor for the whirling particles, is “light emanating from light”—Lumen de Lumine—an ancient alchemical notion referring to the divine light that reveals the mysteries of nature.
5.8: Ken McMullen, Skin Without Skin/Shadows and Errors, 2000–01.
5.9: Ken McMullen, ?Lumen de Lumine, 2000–01.
On February 9, 2006, ?Lumen de Lumine was projected in a six-minute loop onto Torness nuclear power station in Scotland, a major landmark on the East Lothian coast. It was the largest motion picture installation ever seen in Europe, and was viewed by over 20,000 people.
Another McMullen piece, Signatures: Commemorationem, was a thirty-minute film loop of a conversation between McMullen, the physicist John March-Russell, Michael Doser, an experimental physicist at CERN known for his experiments with antimatter, and the critic John Berger, with whom McMullen had previously worked. Berger started the proceedings, stating, “To find something that was previously hidden, you first have to be lost.” The film was made in a natural setting without complex cameras or lighting equipment. Berger insisted that there should be no preparation, just free-flowing conversation, so that “what we see is somebody thinking and not necessarily responding.” The aim of the film, McMullen adds, was “so that anyone can get the drift as to what goes on in particle physics.” The conversation roamed across aesthetics, ethics, and what quantum physics has to say about causality and determinism.
The reviews of Signatures of the Invisible were excellent, although several journalists were mystified as to what they were seeing. But they all got the key point. As Stephen Pile of the Daily Telegraph wrote, “What would C. P. Snow make of all this? It is 42 years since he observed that art and science are separate cultures, but suddenly they are getting along just fine. Science-inspired art events are opening all over the country.” Some 15,000 people saw the exhibition over a period of three weeks.
The CERN physicists Michael Doser and John March-Russell were on hand and gave explanations which were helpful and piqued viewers’ interest. They were extensively quoted, especially March-Russell, whose explanations contained much theoretical physics, right up to high-dimensional membranes and parallel worlds. As Rachel Campbell-Johnston of The Times wrote, “A conversation with a theoretical physicist is like having a pair of jump leads clipped to your brain. Sparks of inspiration fly.”
Signatures of the Invisible was shown in Stockholm, Lisbon, Paris, Strasbourg, Brussels, Tokyo, Australia, and at MoMA PS1 in New York, where 250,000 people came to see it, with 10,000 attending the private viewing. For the PS1 exhibition, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center shipped over particle detectors. The concrete scientific equipment stood alongside the abstract depictions of science.
OVER THE NEXT few years, CERN continued to grab headlines. In 2009, Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel Angels and Demons, bristling with secret societies, symbolism, and the unique addition of an antimatter bomb manufactured at CERN, was filmed there. On its website, CERN emphasized that both the story and the bomb were pure fiction. More recently, Robert Harris based his thriller The Fear Index on CERN and the research going on there.
That same year, 2009, the artist Josef Kristofoletti painted an image of the Atlas Detector, part of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, on the huge building housing it. But in terms of advancing art at CERN, the most important event that year was the arrival of Ariane Koek to start an arts residency program there. She called her new initiative Collide@CERN.
Koek is a dynamo. In the course of a sentence, her voice can shift over an octave. She radiates enthusiasm and sees herself as a cultural specialist. She was formerly at the BBC, where she produced and directed cultural programs including science documentaries. The Clore Leadership Program awarded her a fellowship to pursue cultural projects, and she opted for one outside her comfort zone: art and physics. “For me it was a no-brainer,” she says. “I immediately chose CERN. I’ve always been fascinated by physics, the way it combines an intense logic with an intense imagination.” Collide@CERN came into being in 2011, with an initial plan for it to run for three years, funded in part by Ars Electronica, the digital art center in Linz, Austria.
Koek instigated a formal competition in which the winning artist would spend two months in residence at CERN and a month at Ars Electronica to develop a work inspired by CERN. There was also a second strand of dance and performance inspired by physics, sponsored by the city and canton of Geneva. Koek dubbed this new cultural policy for engaging with the arts “great arts for great science.” At CERN the chosen artist would seek an “inspiration partner” by “speed dating,” the idea being to meet as many scientists as possible, each of whom would explain their work.
Koek felt it was important to keep the artist’s stay at CERN short so that artist and scientist “don’t get too close, so that the artist doesn’t get involved in details. Artists shouldn’t have to prove themselves to the scientist.” The pair would meet regularly, present an onstage conversation at the end of the artist’s residency, and hopefully produce a joint work.
Koek was adamant that Collide@CERN should not be an outreach program, explaining CERN’s activities. Rather, it should aim to put art and science on an equal footing.
CERN’s first artist in residence: Julius von Bismarck
Koek’s first artist in residence was Julius von Bismarck. To call von Bismarck avant-garde is an understatement; he is an artiste provocateur. His works are extraordinary and often set up deliberately to provoke. In 2008 Ars Electronica awarded him the Golden Nica for Image Fulgurator, a camera equipped with a telephoto lens and pistol grip, electronically primed to manipulate photographs as they are being taken—for example, inserting a dove in front of the huge image of Mao Tse Tung in Tiananmen Square. Von Bismarck handles his camera like a pistol, looking appropriately sinister with his long black beard, black stocking cap, and tight-fitting black sweater and trousers.
Behind the dramatic image is a delightful personality and a wry sense of humor, which can be seen in his recent video, Punishing Nature, shot at the Statue of Liberty by a colleague standing unobtrusively in the crowd. First von Bismarck is seen bull-whipping a large rock, then the scene shifts to him whipping the base of the statue. Three burly US Park Police jump on him and handcuff him. One version concludes with von Bismarck lying handcuffed on the deck of the boat that takes tourists back to Manhattan, surrounded by police. The video was made, as he puts it, “in collaboration with the local police.”
Von Bismarck arrived at CERN in 2012 and chose the theoretical physicist James Wells as his “inspiration partner.” He insists that he did not collaborate as such with a scientist at CERN, but was greatly inspired by them all. “I was more interested in an intellectual exchange than in working with their media,” he says. He and Wells hit it off, as their joint presentations demonstrate. Their joint publication has yet to materialize, however, and neither will reveal what it will be, though von Bismarck hints that “international galleries are interested already.”
Von Bismarck’s role was not just to learn but to impart some knowledge of art. He did this in a typically provocative fashion. Some of the physicists had given him a crash course in physics. In exchange, he gave them a crash course in art: five minutes of art history, after which he asked each person to come up with an idea for an artwork. Then they all had to critique each other’s work, a rite of passage in art schools. Finally, he led them out to the parking lot and told them to run around like elementary particles. For another “intervention,” he took physicists into a dark room and asked them to describe things they could not see.
Von Bismarck was impressed by the seriousness of the conversations in the CERN cafeteria. Recalling how, after the war, captured German physicists were interned at Farm Hall, near Cambridge, which was bugged to record their conversations, he decided to record conversations at as many tables at CERN as possible. His plan was to play them back over different channels, making a sound installation scanning the soundscape of the cafeteria.
5.10: Julius von Bismarck, Versuch unter Kreisen, 2012.
In fact, the only work he completed at CERN was one he had begun before coming. Versuch unter Kreisen (Research under Circles) consists of four lights hung by cables of adjustable lengths with three motors in each unit. As the lights swing back and forth, a laptop controls the lengths and frequencies of the movements until, after a certain number of random swings, all four move in unison. It is, says von Bismarck, to do with numbers and thus combines art and science.
What did James Wells get out of the collaboration with von Bismarck? In a panel discussion at CERN in September 2012, he gave his impressions. His previous conception of how artists work had been rather naïve, he confessed. He had thought they just painted and that the first version was generally enough—a Hollywood view of the artist’s life. From von Bismarck he learned that artists work as hard as physicists and need the same dedication. He saw von Bismarck as a positive role model for young physicists, who sometimes emerge from their PhD studies confused, with their creativity undermined. Von Bismarck, said Wells, seemed to be a man who asked himself, “What do I want to do? Here’s how I’ll do it.” Wells added that “von Bismarck brings humor to physics. People at CERN think he is great.”
In fact, Wells’s enthusiasm was not universally shared. A number of physicists at CERN complained that there was little transparency in the program, in that almost nothing was discussed or explained to the group as a whole. Many of the physicists who interacted with von Bismarck got little out of it. As a result few chose to participate, which ran counter to the aim of Collide@CERN, which was to put the artist in close touch with physicists. Von Bismarck was chosen as artist in residence at CERN because of his superstar status as an artist, underscored by the fact that he had won a Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, despite the paucity of his knowledge of physics. Perhaps a person with greater involvement with physics might have left a more enduring footprint.
Another comment was that Collide@CERN was too structured, and there was too much control over the artist. A two months’ residency at CERN is perhaps too long. It might have been better if the artist could have come and gone over a period of time, conversed with physicists, imbibed the atmosphere, then returned to his studio to produce sketches and prototypes. Von Bismarck agrees. “After three months of brain work [two at CERN and one at Ars Electronica], it was so nice to work with my hands again.”
Joe Paradiso of the MIT Media Lab, who made the dancing sneakers that created music in response to the wearer’s movements, did extensive work at CERN and was offered a position there. Regarding artists today, he says, “It’s all about credentials. The modern artist is an artist, technician, and manager.” His advice to Collide@CERN is, “Get a great artist,” someone who “will use the data.” He’s referring to data visualization as a medium. “Use the data, live in it, live in it. That’ll be astounding.”
Luis Álvarez-Gaumé shares these sentiments. What CERN needs is “plenty of space for installations,” he says. “Its laboratories should be filled with inspired art.”
A former head of the theory group at CERN, Álvarez-Gaumé is a renowned physicist and an outspoken advocate of the need for an interplay between physics and art. An aficionado of literature, painting, and music, he often introduces lectures by Koek on Collide@CERN. He is committed to developing an arts dimension at CERN and suggested introducing a 3 percent arts tax on all income there, to be set aside for the arts.
Álvarez-Gaumé suggests letting artists loose, with no constraints such as an “inspiration partner” and no limited residency—no residency at all, for that matter. Let them wander around, then go back to their studios and encourage them to return. CERN, he continues, has the cachet to attract top-rate artists, who should be invited and paid for their services, and “hopefully they will leave something behind.” Since research at CERN explores the invisible, he suggests that “artists with abstract ideas” should be preferred.
When I ask whether he has any particular artist in mind, he names Keith Tyson, who had recently visited CERN.
Abstract physics/abstract art: Keith Tyson
In 2002 Keith Tyson won the Turner Prize for Artmachine, an arcane system which he developed using computer programs, flow charts, and books to generate chance combinations of words and ideas which he then turns into artworks. He calls it “the fusion of mathematics and reality through a computer.” Some of the works he developed from Artmachine and put on show for the Turner Prize included sci-fi, Heath Robinson–type devices such as The Thinker (After Rodin)—Technical/Notes, 2001, a hexagonal monolithic black structure with computers humming inside which he called “a comatose god running its own universe” (see Insert), and two paintings entitled Two Discrete Molecules of Simultaneity.
Tyson is often referred to as the “mad professor,” and his work regularly touches on and incorporates science. He is a man with big ideas that emerge from a well-thought-out theme based in science: the emergence of simplicity from complexity. Self-taught, he knows a lot about complexity theory and sees the “world as information, as emergence out of nothing.”
Born in the north of England, Tyson is proud of his working-class roots. He was interested in science from an early age, building computers and designing games with code which he taught himself. His artistic talent was encouraged by his primary school teacher. Tyson left school at fifteen and spent five years working as a welder in a shipyard, building nuclear submarines and learning engineering in the process; then, when he was twenty, he went to art school.
Tyson thinks deeply and carefully about what he does. “Richness is always at the frontiers,” he says. “Stuff happens at the edge of a cloud, at boundaries between countries. But reality is beyond all that—reality doesn’t care about boundaries.” He sees no “dichotomy between science and art [but is] interested in modeling the world.” Art and science are not, for him, exclusive categories. “They are ways of exploring the same things, one culture with two fascinating abilities. One should talk about exploring the already existing fusion between the two. Society suffers from reduction and compartmentalization, leading to ‘social autism.’ ”
Armed with such thoughts, Tyson enjoyed the visit he made to CERN in 2009. He recalls it as an “extraordinary place where curiosity is still important.” He was impressed that “like good artists, good scientists are simple in their explanations, open-minded, humbled by experience. The discussions were fascinating.”
Seeking a visual language for scientific art: Steve Miller
Steve Miller’s work ranges from x-ray portraits and Rorschach tests to DNA art. We meet outside his spacious studio on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He has a second studio in Sagaponack, in the Hamptons, in a converted potato barn once owned by the artist Frank Stella. A lot of Miller’s savvy comes from jobs he took early on to support his art—bartender, ski instructor, studio assistant, construction worker, and commodities trader, all jobs that require personality, confidence, and verve, which he has in abundance. Nowadays, as well as being a practicing artist, Miller teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His interests include biology art and physics art.
Born in Buffalo, New York, he was taken to museums by his parents so often as a child that eventually he came to appreciate them, especially the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where he encountered Jackson Pollock’s spectacular Convergence, a massive work nearly eight by thirteen feet. It was a major event for a twelve-year-old. “It, like, knocked me out,” he says. Miller’s family offered no direct support for his artistic aspirations but “artistic encouragement was in the genes.” Miller’s grandfather was the glass designer who created the iconic Coca-Cola bottle, while his great-grandfather was a portrait painter of some renown as well as an agent for Tsar Nicholas II charged with acquiring paintings, particularly Impressionists.
Miller did some painting in high school and went on to Middlebury College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, where he majored in fine arts, specializing in sculpture. He then spent two years as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, then by degrees relocated to New York and the Hamptons.
In New York in the early 1970s, Miller continued to sculpt, then turned to Abstract Expressionist painting. Soon disenchantment set in: “The habitual gestures of making paintings had become frustrating and were feeling meaningless.” He started making movies and working in commercial film. But this still wasn’t immediate enough for him. He longed to put brush to canvas, pencil to paper once again.
Looking into Cubism he became “totally enchanted with that epoch” and its new visual language, developed in response to innovations in technology. This was the sort of art he wanted to do.
Perhaps, like Picasso at the turn of the twentieth century, he was in at the beginning of a new avant-garde. He took in the dramatic changes happening in computers, technology, and science. This was how it happened in Cubism, he reasoned. After all, “changes in technology and changes in science allow for changes in consciousness.” “Man, I wanted to be in on the next epistemological break,” he says, “epistemological break” being a term from the French philosopher Michel Foucault meaning a rupture from accepted knowledge that is felt immediately. Miller was sure that the new technologies could be used “to reinvent new genres, to literally get inside, to reinvent portraiture.”
Miller has always believed that the job of the artist should be to reveal truths. The 1980s was an era fraught with corruption, greed, and the dominance of the military-industrial complex, with AIDS running rampant. There seemed to be “a breakdown in culture, society, and the human body.” Why not “use science to look at pathology as a metaphor” for this breakdown?
He was looking for a way to do this when he came across Rorschach tests, in which subjects interpret ink blots. Psychologists claimed to be able to deduce a person’s personality and emotional state from their interpretations. If a prisoner up for parole gives a sinister interpretation of a Rorschach blot, he would be less likely to be freed than if he gave a more benign one. This social aspect fascinated Miller; he also liked the fact that the blots were “somebody else’s piece of paint.” He liked the randomness of the process, the fact that he was not responsible for whatever shapes emerged. So he took the blots and made them into art. He scanned them, photographed them from the computer screen, then printed them onto silk screens and touched up the result with acrylics. Now, “a blob of paint had a scientific meaning.” And each person still saw them in a different way.
“Technology allows you to penetrate, to get inside,” he says, referring to x-rays, MRI and CAT scans that make the invisible visible. To him, the “beauty of these images is that they are the biological, technological, scientific equivalents of the Rorschach blots.” They tell us about pathology, about the state of the body. To the untrained eye, an x-ray or an MRI scan looks like a surreal jumble, but a scientist looking at the same scan can make out a virus or a cancer cell. In the same way that the Rorschach test can be a litmus test of a culture—instead of seeing a butterfly, people might see “Hiroshima or bloody fetuses on the pavement”—scans are used to reveal diseases of the body.
Reasoning in this way, Miller turned to medical pathology as a metaphor for cultural diseases. First he took images from medical texts. Then he tried using medical imaging as a new way of making a portrait. “It was a new way to take on a historically dead genre, to reinvent a genre that had been marginalized by photography.” Miller’s aim was to use “new technologies to reinvent new genres, literally to get inside, to reinvent portraiture”—to produce an internal portraiture. “All of a sudden, I realized there was this whole other world that couldn’t be seen by the eye but could be visualized through the new technology.” Imaging enabled him to move away from traditional portraiture, in which the eyes communicate the subject’s inner being, to a new view of the subject, a new way to understand what a human being is. “We really have windows into the human body.”
Through friends in medical research, Miller was able to use x-ray machines, sonogram apparatus, MRI and CAT instruments, as well as electron microscopes. He was like a child in a toy store. In 1993, as a gift for two patrons, Jacques and Véronique Mauguin, Miller combined sonograms of two fetuses in their mother’s womb which he silk-screened and sandwiched beneath a radiograph of the father’s hip. The finished work is entitled Portrait of Jacques and Véronique Mauguin.
In Portrait of Pierre Restany, also produced in 1993, in Paris, he depicts the French art critic and philosopher Pierre Restany as an x-ray profile, complete with glasses and cigar, with another x-ray image of his hands (see Insert). The entire canvas is silk-screened and bleached by acrylic, with a graduated scale like those used in word-processing software along the side.
Since the 1980s, computers had been part and parcel of his art. But as late as 1993 the art world still considered computers a gimmick, not part of serious art, “whereas today all artists use computers.” In Paris, the mood was different; France had embraced the new technology. Everyone had a Minitel, like a small computer, which you could use with your telephone line to make purchases or reserve seats at a restaurant, or—famously—to flirt. Handheld devices for paying with a credit card also started in France. The graduated markings in the portrait of Pierre Restany emphasize Miller’s respect for computers as well as his interest in cognitive science, a quantitative study of the mind based on seeing it as an information processing system, somewhat like a computer. Indeed, Miller considers his portraiture a new way of looking into the mind.
Another 1993 work, Portrait of Dr. William Frosch, his psychiatrist, superimposes slices of MRI scans of the doctor’s head with a Rorschach image, once again a silk screen on canvas, bleached with acrylic to produce a surreal juxtaposition. Besides being a portrait of Dr. Frosch, it is also a view into the mind of the person looking at it. One of Miller’s self-portraits, Self Portrait Yellow, completed earlier, in 1992, is an MRI of his own spine superimposed with EKG signals together with an MRI of his scrotum. Another self-portrait consists of a CAT scan of his head and spine, with EKG signals superimposed to evoke his bodily rhythms.
He has also made forays into DNA art, producing a portrait by mixing the nuclei of some of the subject’s blood cells into a bean culture. Using an electron microscope, he photographed the nuclei after they had undergone differentiation (mitosis). He then photographed the chromosomes under an electron microscope as they divided. Then he scanned the images into a computer to produce a genetic portrait, an extraordinary and beautiful image that looks like a cloud of bubbles.
Miller began x-raying and scanning anything he could lay his hands on—women’s high-heeled shoes, his mother’s handbag. In 2007 he made a powerful x-ray image of a Glock pistol being loaded by a skeletal hand and called it Glock. Scientists were amazed and envious of what he got away with. He “brought into radiological labs all sorts of things, like snakes, guitars, violins. Scientists never get to play like that.” This, in his view, is what an artist can bring to a medical laboratory.
Back in 2000, the director of the Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) in Upton, Long Island, had invited a group of artists to meet the scientists who work there. For Miller the big attraction was the BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), 2.5 miles across, which was used to study the debris from collisions of protons hitting protons, and of heavy nuclei such as gold and lead smashing into each other at speeds close to that of light. At the time it was the only accelerator studying heavy nuclei. Now the Large Hadron Collider at CERN devotes a month each year to this research.
The aim of smashing heavy nuclei together was to re-create conditions at the moment of the Big Bang, the creation of the universe, when temperatures were about a million trillion degrees Centigrade. At Brookhaven, they actually did it. For a few billionths of a second, the protons and neutrons that made up the heavy nuclei melted. Then their fundamental constituents, quarks—the building blocks of matter—and gluons—the particles that glue them together—burst free to form the quark–gluon plasma. It was as if they had moved back in time. The existence of the quark–gluon plasma was first shown at Brookhaven.
The quark–gluon plasma is like a sort of hot primordial soup. Studying it could give us further information about what conditions were like in the very early universe, before quarks bound together to form protons and neutrons and stopped existing as free particles. To Miller the RHIC was like an imaging machine that looked into the body, except that it looked into nature instead.
In the course of that visit, Miller met Steve Adler, who worked on one of the giant detectors, PHENIX (Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment), whose task was to actually detect the quark–gluon plasma. “They invited me to do whatever I wanted,” he tells me. It turned out to be an embarrassment of riches. Adler was an engineer in information technology. His job was to write the code instructing PHENIX how to detect the quark–gluon plasma. “Steve showed up at the site of the experiment in Brookhaven,” Adler recalls, “and I showed him around, giving him everything he wanted—items like physics doodles on the back of paper scraps, software source code printouts, and all the photos he wished to take. From that he started creating his art which I found inspiring.”
Miller’s starting point was a discovery he had made the previous year in Singapore, when he was teaching art there. He came across stores selling Neolithic pottery, dating from 5000 BC, for almost nothing. The pots struck him as not only beautiful but an early “investigation of matter, taking dirt and doing this.” His studio is now full of ancient pottery. His realization was “how to tell the story.” The RHIC enabled him to tell it as a “time line of human development, from mud pies to the [discovery of the] quark–gluon plasma.” Among the works he produced is Neolithic Quark (2001), a series of paintings overlaying images of Chinese Neolithic pots with software codes and physics equations, providing a timeline from one of the earliest experiments in transforming matter right up to the present. Untitled 91101 is from that series (see next page).
Miller also spent time at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), also at Brookhaven. This massive machine accelerates electrons so that they emit light and is used to study the structure of crystals. One of the scientists there introduced Miller to Roderick MacKinnon, based at Rockefeller University, who was using the light emitted from electrons to study the structure of proteins. MacKinnon was interested in how certain proteins—ion channels—permit ions such as calcium, sodium, potassium, and chloride to enter cells. These ions cross cell membranes at up to a million ions per second. This is an electrical process. Our bodies, of course, are electrochemical engines. MacKinnon took snapshots of ion channels using the NSLS which helped him discover their spatial structure and how they can pass through cellular walls, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 2003.
5.11: Steve Miller, Untitled 91101, 2001.
The two men hit it off, and MacKinnon invited Miller to Rockefeller and gave him access to his notebooks. In 2003, Miller produced a series of works, among them Protein #330. In this rather magical work he uses a photograph of a potassium ion channel, identified using light from the NSLS, silk-screened onto a canvas, with a photograph of equations which MacKinnon had written on his blackboard superimposed on top of it. The equations also describe the process by which ions diffuse through cell walls.
Miller’s work is sometimes misunderstood. In November 2007, in a publication called Big Red & Shiny, the art critic Katie Hargrave wrote a review of his exhibition Spiralling Inward at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. This is what she wrote of Protein #330: “Silk-screened on canvas, Dr. MacKinnon’s notebook page is obstructed by this confusing protein image, with only the title words and a mess of partial equations showing through. What qualities do we need, Mr. Miller? The work creates a conversation between the neurobiologists who understand these equations, but in their obstruction, he denies the usability of the science. Instead, viewers are left with undeniably beautiful and poetic images. If Miller is disallowing the scientists to be able to understand this work, then who is it for?”
At least she saw the totality as beautiful and poetic. “If you read this review through the lens of an art critic, I fared pretty well on many fronts,” says Miller. Cate McQuaid, a more scientifically literate art critic, described the exhibition as “an affirmation of life.”
In avant-garde circles, Miller says, “beauty is, for many, a forbidden word.” Beauty is not something he considers before beginning a work, rather “it’s the result of a process” which encompasses past experience, thought, and the making of the work itself. As artists often do, he emphasizes the process over the end result. Yet in the end he chooses not to make any definite statement, simply noting that beauty is, like a Rorschach test, in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps more explanation might have helped in the exhibition at Brandeis. These works are not responses to emotional situations or landscapes. Nevertheless, like the works of old masters, works that bring together science and art deserve close study and much thought.
Miller does not collaborate with scientists. Rather, “scientists cooperate with me.” What he brings to his relationship with scientists is a thorough knowledge of art and its history, gleaned from years of study. But if he produced a work in very close cooperation with a scientist, he would certainly add their name to it, he says. What is important to Miller is the “cross-pollination that can loosen everybody up. Art gives scientists permission to play.”
Too often, he says, scientists “appreciate art but know nothing about it.” Once, when he gave a lecture at CERN, a scientist, thinking of classical art, asked how Miller could consider his own work to be art. Artists’ visits to labs such as Brookhaven and CERN give scientists some idea as to what the present world of art is all about. Certainly art can be useful “to present complicated information to an audience, as for example, in Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, which portrays a drama about the bomb. It’s not about science, however. I would like to do that,” says Miller.
Steve Adler, who works on PHENIX searching for the quark-gluon plasma, says that Miller’s art had no direct effect on his work. But, he adds, “Steve’s influence on my work at that time would have been like a breeze blowing cross-bow on an oil tanker. But I did feel the breeze.” Keenly aware of the art world, Adler has always appreciated and “been aware of the creative intellect we share with artists.” Both seek to understand the “world out there”—artists with canvas, pen, and paper, scientists with mathematics. Adler’s contact with Miller reinforced his belief “that both art and science play equal roles in our quest to understand the world we live in.”
Adler is also well aware of the schism between art and science that came with the Industrial Revolution, raising the scientist’s status to that of “new magicians, with artists relegated to more of an intellectual pastime status—an unfortunate asymmetry.” With regard to his work as a scientist, “I see my motivation in a larger context, one which Steve [Miller] helped me to understand.”
“Expertise demands discipline and focus,” says Miller. “There is so much to learn that it’s very difficult to do both [art and science].” Nevertheless, his work with scientists has produced some fascinating, profound, and—dare I say—beautiful works of art.
Beyond space-time and matter: Antony Gormley
Most of Antony Gormley’s sculptures are based on the human body, often his own. One of the best known is Event Horizon, thirty-one statues of naked men cast from his own body, which appeared dotted around streets and the tops of buildings in London in 2007. Eight years earlier, in 1999, Gormley created Quantum Cloud for a site next to London’s Millennium Dome. This is a massive piece some 90 feet high, made up of 5-foot-long steel sections assembled according to a “random walk” procedure, an algorithm according to which successive pieces can have no correlation with what went before. Although the steel sections are arranged entirely at random, the base of the sculpture is an enlarged image of Gormley’s body, of which a shadowy form can still be seen. Gormley has said that the inspiration for Quantum Cloud came from conversations he had with the physicist Basil Hiley on what might have been the mathematical structure of the universe before space-time and matter came into existence.
Born in Yorkshire in 1950, as a child Gormley loved Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. He was equally interested in science, particularly biology. He had a crystal garden, his “own laboratory in the garden shed where I would make explosions and precipitate crystals.” Books by writers such as David Bohm and Fritjof Capra, who explored consciousness and the connections between quantum physics and Buddhism, suggested that his twin interests of art and science could be brought together.
He went on to study archaeology, anthropology, and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, then traveled to India and Sri Lanka, to explore his interest in Buddhism, and finally went to Central Saint Martins College of Art in London, then on to Goldsmiths, and then to a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade. The works that followed included the celebrated Angel of the North, completed in 1998. A gigantic human figure 66 feet high, cast in steel with two massive outstretched wings 177 feet across, standing on a hillside near Gateshead keeping watch over the main road and railways headed north, it’s a well-loved landmark for all who pass by.
In 2006, Gormley, by now a famous sculptor, had a major exhibition at Galerie Ropac in Paris. Among the exhibits was an installation called Breathing Room. It was like a three-dimensional drawing, a framework of aluminum tubes forming the outline of rooms nesting one inside the other, which the viewer could walk into and through. Covered in phosphorescent paint, it glowed at night. Gormley called it a “three-dimensional drawing in space.” Making the installation led him to think about how space was contained within the structures and how they changed their nature depending on the light. He suspected that these were the sorts of questions considered by scientists at leading scientific establishments such as CERN. So he convened a “little conference,” inviting Michael Doser from CERN, as well as other scientists. Doser in turn invited Gormley to visit CERN in 2008, and in the course of the visit enquired as to who they should approach for a commission. Gormley replied that he didn’t need a commission. “I would be very honored to be able to donate them a work and I gave them Feeling Material XXXIV.”
The work, a swirl of iron spirals in which the viewer can just about make out a human form, Gormley’s preferred theme, was installed above the central staircase in the main administration building. Gormley describes it as “an attempt to materialize the place at the other side of appearance where we all live.” He was, he says, inspired by the dramatic discoveries at CERN, which have “led to a reassessment of the standard view of atomic structure, and I felt that, maybe, Feeling Material XXXIV evoked that.” As in Breathing Room, Gormley continues to explore the meaning of the space inside his wire sculptures.
5.12: Antony Gormley, Feeling Material XXXIV, 2008. 5mm square section mild steel bar, 155 x 244 x 153 cm. Collection of CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. Photograph by Stephen White, London. © the artist.
CERN physicists have described Feeling Material XXXIV as representing the wave/particle duality of elementary particles, or a particle’s trajectory as it moves through the liquid in a bubble chamber. Whatever it represents, it succeeds in sparking conversations about art in a scientific laboratory.
Another of Gormley’s works that involved science was Blind Light, an installation which formed part of the first major exhibition of his work at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2007. Blind Light is deceptively simple: a glass-enclosed room filled with clouds of vapor. Visitors stepping inside are immediately disoriented. They find themselves stumbling about in a dense fog in which they can hear other people but not see them until they lurch into them, a little like being at the bottom of the ocean. Viewers outside the room can see the emerging silhouettes of those inside. To create this pea soup, Gormley consulted scientists at Imperial College who specialize in cloud science, who advised him on the necessary conditions regarding water vapor and temperature, helping him develop “the highest density cloud composed of the smallest possible water particles.”
Gormley has also spoken with the British mathematician Roger Penrose about how to construct geometrical figures out of foam. Penrose contributed an essay to the Hayward’s exhibition catalogue on how Gormley’s objects relate to topology, the mathematics of surfaces.
“Collaboration is alive and well in the scientific community. Artists could learn a lot from them,” Gormley says. “I don’t think the two cultures should ever have parted company. Anybody with a curious mind (and I think all human beings have curiosity) has the potential to mix intuition and empirical analysis, and I think that’s what art is.” All the scientists he has met, he says, “in particular Roger Penrose, have been the most curious and open-minded about the world around them.” He sums up: “Art does a similar thing: it proposes a model through which we can look at the world around us.”
The buck stops here: Rolf-Dieter Heuer
Having risen through the ranks of German physics, Rolf-Dieter Heuer has been director general of CERN since 2009, a position akin to that of CEO of a huge multinational corporation. An imposing man with a mane of white hair and a full goatee, he focuses fully on the person to whom he is speaking at the time. I am well aware that fifteen minutes after I begin the interview it will be over. Both he and I have to be super-efficient.
His favorite quote, he says, is the famous words of Paul Klee which form the motif of this book: “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” What this means to him, he says, is that art makes the invisible visible. This is also his own personal quest as a physicist, as he studies the invisible world of elementary particles, the building blocks of nature. He has clear views on CERN’s artist in residence program, Collide@CERN. “I hope that scientists realize the importance of art and will connect with society. We have to show society what we are worth and what we are doing for society. To transmit that through art, partially at least, in my mind is important and it opens horizons.” He is sensitive to critics of CERN, who ask what exactly it contributes to society given the large amount of money it absorbs. The artistic dimension could be at least a part of a response to those criticisms, he says.
Heuer does not believe that art and science will ever come together. The “questions are so deep today that they cry out for specialization.” He points out the “difficulty to act as an individual today. All is teamwork, to function as a creative group.” I ask whether this holds for theoretical physicists as well as for experimentalists, who work in groups numbering in the hundreds. Even in theoretical physics, Heuer answers, “The solitary worker is gone.”
5.13: Steve Miller, Cables, 2012.
Theoretical physicists have a well-defined sense of beauty—as in, for example, a beautiful equation. Heuer is an experimental physicist who uses instruments that dwarf people, made up of thousands of wires connecting magnets and complex electronic circuits. What he seeks, he says, is “functionality rather than beauty.” To him functionality is aesthetic, “but this goes along with beauty as in the alignment of cables.” At CERN, the alignment of cables—wires laid out in parallel with each other—are works of art in themselves. There are no unsightly tangled masses here. Some laboratories have row upon row of cabinets with transparent plastic doors enclosing shelves, each holding a myriad of color-coded circuits, which might well be works of minimalist art.
“If it functions well, it has to be beautiful,” Heuer concludes.