Becoming a proton
By Gianni Motti
My film, HIGGS, In Search of the Anti-Motti, introduces a human dimension into the huge-scale particle accelerator experiments which scientists use to understand the Universe.
The film came about as part of a collaboration with a physicist from the European Agency for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. We worked together as artist and scientist to mark the centenary of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a theory which explains the history and expansion of our Universe.
CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory - and also where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web!
Aerial view of CERN, courtesy CERN Geneva.
When I visited, I was impressed by the complex and futuristic technology, and particularly by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a gigantic scientific machine located inside a 27 km circular underground tunnel.
The LHC is not only the world’s largest particle accelerator but also the largest machine ever built.
Scientists use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding two beams of particles travelling in opposite directions at close to the speed of light.
The collider propels the particles at temperatures more than a trillion degrees centigrade, recreating the conditions at the time when the Universe was first formed.
It seems that at the moment of the Big Bang, there was as much matter as antimatter, but this antimatter since seems to have disappeared…There is now more matter in the Universe than antimatter.
As an artist facing all that, I felt depressed! So I decided to compare myself to a proton and filmed myself walking around the entire ring of the LHC.
“HIGGS, In Search of the Anti-Motti“, 2005. Walk in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider, 27km, CERN, Geneva. Copyright Gianni Motti.
At an unaccelerated human pace it took me about six hours, whereas a proton in the LHC could travel 11000 times around the ring in one second.
After two kilometres, I lost all notion of time and space. I don’t remember anything, I was elsewhere. I was hypnotised by the monotonous tunnel, as if in a video game.
“HIGGS, In Search of the Anti-Motti“, 2005. Walk in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider, 27km, CERN, Geneva. Copyright Gianni Motti.
When I arrived at the end of the tunnel, I wanted to continue! I wasn’t tired. When I came out, I had the feeling that other people were six hours older.
Perhaps one day this huge Collider will investigate some mysterious traces of anti-Motti…
Gianni Motti is a conceptual artist who contextualizes ready-made objects in unexpected ways in works of sculpture, video, and site-specific installations, inflected with what has been called “disarming simplicity”. HIGGS, In Search of the Anti-Motti by Gianni Motti is on display as part of DARK MATTER: 95% of the Universe is Missing at Science Gallery London until 26 August 2019.
June 12, 2019