DETECTORS

October 9 through December 18, 2015

Opening on October 8, 7pm

FL GALLERY – SPAZIO 22

Viale Sabotino, 22 – Milan


FL GALLERY in collaboration with the CMS Experiment of CERN is pleased to present Luca Pozzi’s third solo exhibition in its spaces. The project is dedicated to the Italian director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Fabiola Giannotti, and conceived by the artist as a celebration of 13 TeV, collision energy expressed in tera electron volt, achieved by the Large Hadron Collider in May this year. An outstanding achievement that has allowed for the first time in human history to probe the matter in regions to scale smaller than the dimensions of quarks (<10-18 meters).

The site-specific installation, located in the former vault of Viale Sabotino 22, is composed of three giant digital photos on PVC taken from CERN and LHC experiments online archive to entirely cover three walls of the room. On these surfaces Pozzi installs the works consisting in four dodecagonal surfaces of anodized aluminum containing thirty ping-pong balls in magnetic suspension. The “Detectors”, the name of this new series and title of the exhibition, are intended by the artist as pictorial devices suspended in space and time. They represent, through the sportive allegory of the ping-pong game, the particle of the beam captured just a moment before a hypothetical collision within one of the four LHC detectors.

The right wall of the gallery is connected, in a prospective game, to the “Atlas” detector during the construction years; highlighting in this way the existence of a past time preceding the experiment. The left wall breaks instead on a graphical display representing the computerized processing of data obtained from a collision in the detector “Alice”; spotlighting a later time in the experiment. Finally, on the twelve meters long front wall a photograph taken by Michael Hoch from CMS is reproduced, it represents the part of CMS community responsible for the design, construction and implementation of CMS experiments. They are greeting the art public and receiving them in the exhibition from the building 40 at CERN in Geneva. These tireless and determined researchers are portrayed together in this historical shot; they constitute in this case a window that Pozzi opens into the future.

Past, present and future are so intimately connected in a network of relationships where there are explicit references to art history. Luca Pozzi’s passion for Lucio Fontana, Frank Stella, Alberto Burri and Enrico Castellani blends in subtle cross-disciplinary references, magically combining contemporary art and science, informatics and technology. Since his first visit to the CERN, in April of 2009, the artist begun to cultivate the idea of a project that would pay homage to the International Laboratory. Luca Pozzi is not only interested in the theoretical research, of which he esteems and appreciates the more speculative aspects of quantum gravity, but extends also to the chain reactions based on it thereon. Worthy of note is that it was in the same CERN Laboratory that Tim Berners-Lee developed, in October of ’90, the application that started the World Wild Web and the digital revolution of the Internet, which has so greatly changed the course of our lives.

 

DETECTORS, 2015 Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTORS, 2015
Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini
Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTORS, 2015 Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTORS, 2015
Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini
Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

Luca_Pozzi_detectors_5_SMALL

DETECTORS, 2015 Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTORS, 2015 Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTORS, 2015
Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini
Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTORS, 2015 Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTORS, 2015
Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini
Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTORS, 2015 Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTORS, 2015
Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini
Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTOR [black], 2015 Anodized aluminium, ping pong balls, wire, magnets, 175x175x25 cm Courtesy Federico Luger (FL Gallery) - background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector)

DETECTOR [black], 2015
Anodized aluminium, ping pong balls, wire, magnets, 175x175x25 cm
Courtesy Federico Luger (FL Gallery) – background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector)

DETECTORS, 2015 Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTORS, 2015
Exhibition view Federico Luger (FL Gallery), photo credit Cosimo Filippini
Background image credit: CERN (LHC, Atlas Detector) and Michael Hoch (CMS Experiment)

DETECTOR [blue-white], 2015 Anodized aluminium, ping pong balls, wire, magnets, 175x175x25 cm Courtesy Federico Luger (FL Gallery)

DETECTOR [blue-white], 2015
Anodized aluminium, ping pong balls, wire, magnets, 175x175x25 cm
Courtesy Federico Luger (FL Gallery)

DETECTOR [blue-white], 2015 Anodized aluminium, ping pong balls, wire, magnets, 175x175x25 cm Courtesy Federico Luger (FL Gallery)

DETECTOR [blue-white], 2015
Anodized aluminium, ping pong balls, wire, magnets, 175x175x25 cm
Courtesy Federico Luger (FL Gallery)

DETECTOR [blue-yellow], 2015 Anodized aluminium, ping pong balls, wire, magnets, 175x175x25 cm Courtesy Federico Luger (FL Gallery)

DETECTOR [blue-yellow], 2015
Anodized aluminium, ping pong balls, wire, magnets, 175x175x25 cm
Courtesy Federico Luger (FL Gallery)

External Reference:

“The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle colliderthe largest, most complex experimental facility ever built, and the largest single machine in the world.[1] It was built by theEuropean Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.[2] It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near GenevaSwitzerland. Its first research run took place from 30 March 2010 to 13 February 2013 at an initial energy of 3.5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) per beam (7 TeV total), almost 4 times more than the previous world record for a collider,[3] rising to 4 TeV per beam (8 TeV total) from 2012.[4][5] On 13 February 2013 the LHC’s first run officially ended, and it was shut down for planned upgrades. ‘Test’ collisions restarted in the upgraded collider on 5 April 2015,[6][7] reaching 6.5 TeV per beam on 20 May 2015 (13 TeV total, the current world record). Its second research run commenced on schedule, on 3 June 2015.[8]

The LHC’s aim is to allow physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physicshigh-energy physics and in particular, to further test the properties of the Higgs boson[9] and the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetric theories,[10] and other unsolved questions of physics, advancing human understanding of physical laws. It contains seven detectors, each designed for certain kinds of research. The proton-proton collision is the primary operation method, but the LHC has also collided protons with lead nuclei for two months in 2013 and used lead–lead collisions for about one month each in 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2015 for other investigations.

The LHC’s computing grid was (and currently is) a world record holder. Data from collisions was produced at an unprecedented rate for the time of first collisions, tens of petabytes per year, a major challenge at the time, to be analysed by a grid-based computer network infrastructure connecting 140 computing centers in 35 countries[11][12] – by 2012 the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid was also the world’s largest distributedcomputing grid, comprising over 170 computing facilities in a worldwide network across 36 countries.[13][14][15]

Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down altogether. Data is also needed from high energy particle experiments to suggest which versions of current scientific models are more likely to be correct – in particular to choose between the Standard Model and Higgsless models and to validate their predictions and allow further theoretical development. Many theorists expect new physics beyond the Standard Model to emerge at the TeV energy level, as the Standard Model appears to be unsatisfactory. Issues possibly to be explored by LHC collisions include:[16][17]

Other open questions that may be explored using high energy particle collisions: