Higgs. A la recherche de l'anti-Motti. Fascinated by the eccentricity of antimatter, the artist has taken a plunge into the world of physics this summer. While his Big Crunch Clock ticks away five billion years toward the end of the world over the entrance of the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, the scientific efforts at CERN turn back the clock to the Big Bang.
Higgs
A la recherche de l'anti-Motti
As hardly anyone knows, 2005 is the world year of physics. At the one hundredth
anniversary of Einstein's revolutionary discoveries, preparations to take physics to the
next level are in high gear. One hundred meters below surface at the border between
Switzerland and France near Geneva, physicists and engineers at the world's largest
particle physics laboratory, CERN, are assembling the Taj Mahal of particle accelerators,
the Large Hadron Collider. These physicists are determined to alter our view of the
universe by penetrating ever more deeply into the mysteries of the universe's smallest
particles and the forces that bind them together, bring them into existence, and give them
mass. The anticipation of scientific discoveries, of particles such as the Higgs boson that
were named years ago but never seen, or the properties and whereabouts of antimatter,
should be taken seriously from a team of scientist that collects Nobel prices like some
collect works of art.
Fascinated by the eccentricity of antimatter, Gianni Motti has taken a plunge into the world
of physics this summer. While his Big Crunch Clock ticks away five billion years toward
the end of the world over the entrance of the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, the
scientific efforts at CERN turn back the clock to the Big Bang. Current scientific theories
indicate that the Big Bang was a burst of energy that transformed into matter. Recent
discoveries in particle accelerator experiments, however, reveal that such transformations
from energy always simultaneously produce equivalent amounts of matter and antimatter,
which annihilate on contact. Why the known universe is made of matter, and what may
have happened to antimatter – whether it hides out in the far reaches of the universe or
whether it was completely destroyed in the first moments of the universe's existence - are
mysteries as yet unsolved. A 27 km particle circuit complete with several cathedral-sized
experiment sites scheduled to commence operation in 2007 will bring us a step closer to
the beginning of time, the origin of the universe, and perhaps of an anti-universe.
Gianni Motti's exploration of these phenomena is at the same time an approach to the
node of being and nothingness and a mirroring of the self in antimatter, which, as an
analogy for this reality-hacking artist, and like his output, is a rare, fleeting, and unlikely
creation.
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