In the last few months I have followed a team working with the Gemini laser at the CLF. Dr Rajeev Pattathil led the team and kindly allowed me to take part in aspects of the experiment and also set up my own camera equipment in the target area.
Gemini is a petawatt class laser with 2 beams, allowing very high energy and very short timescale experiments. The team were studying many different aspects of the laser interaction with the targets to better understand a number of properties of plasma. This is an area of high energy physics where things start to behave very strangely.
My goal with this project is to investigate the strong similarity I see between scientists and artists, I wanted to do this by taking part in their experiment. My hypothesis is that both ultimately search for truth and both see beauty in that truth.
What this group of scientists were doing over the month long period of the experiment (and many months before and after in preparation and analyzation) was an immensely creative exercise. They were creating new ways of looking at the world, both physically and conceptually in order to better understand it. Everyone from the scientists who designed and built the laser (which is constantly adapted and monitored), to the scientists who designed the experiment (which involved weeks of building tables full of lenses, mirrors and heaps of high tech diagnostics) are as creative and inventive as the most adapt artist.
The creative and abstract thinking involved in building such a thing is immense. This is where I see similarities with a more conceptual form of art. There is something that they’re looking for which you can not look at, is as hot as the sun and it’s all over in timescales only an atom would understand. Their task is to build a machine that can look at this in an almost sideways and abstract manner.
The final product of this experiment will be a paper (or number of papers). This will add to the permanent advancement of knowledge that incrementally benefits and enriches us all. What greater artwork is there than that?
So the goal of this project is to present the scientists as the artists. By making some of their targets and working with them throughout the experiment I’ve tentatively entered the role of a scientist. The final exhibition of this work will see me in a curatorial role, pushing the scientists into the role of artists and their work to the fore as an artwork.