A distorted tennis ball coming from space at ultra-high-speed is materialized, blocked a moment before its impact.
The sculptural device, result of a collaboration with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), is imagined as a time compression parenthesis obtained by connecting a 5.500 years ago technic “the bronze casting” with a brand new experimental physics technology called “muonic scintillator” able to detect the passage, beyond the metallic material surface, of an otherwise invisible subatomic particles, signaling them with a light impulse.
The Dragon’s Egg is an archaic element but alludes to maximum dematerialization, to quantum entanglement, to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, to the energy limit of the Planck Scale, to the discretion of neutrinos and the futuristic drifts of IMB’s quantum computing.
It’s a “WIMP”, literally “good for nothing”, but in scientific jargon, it represents the acronym of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle.
It’s, first of all, a communicator in which complex systems collide, subliminally speaking of gravitational waves, dark matter, and multi-messenger cosmology.
It puts us in direct connection, through a simple flash of light, with a particle drifting, the witness of some gargantuan cosmic event that may have happened thousands of light-years ago, removing the distance that normally separates a hypothetical active observer from the decay of a probabilistic wave function, otherwise confined in the cryptic meanders of the mathematical language.
Exhibition view at Edicola Radetzky, Milano. photo credit: Maurangelo Quagliarella / Dragon’s Egg, 2018. Mirrored Bronze, still, muonic scintillator INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), 100x50x50 cm
Exhibition view at Edicola Radetzky, Milano. photo credit: Maurangelo Quagliarella / Dragon’s Egg, 2018. Mirrored Bronze, still, muonic scintillator INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), 100x50x50 cm
Original Fermi telescope circuits by INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (detail)
Exhibition view at Edicola Radetzky, Milano. photo credit: Maurangelo Quagliarella / Dragon’s Egg, 2018. Mirrored Bronze, still, muonic scintillator INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), 100x50x50 cm
Dragon’s Egg, 2018. Mirrored Bronze, still, muonic scintillator INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), 100x50x50 cm (detail)