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Skipping merrily about the Vallee de Joux<\/a> for New Scientist,\u00a030 June 2018<\/a><\/p>\n IT\u2019S not often that artists presenting new work ask for the lights to be turned off, but here it makes sense. We hunker in the dark of hall 2 at the Messe Basel exhibition centre in Switzerland as tiny lights spill over the mesh sides of a large mechanical sculpture, producing tracks and spirals, and interference.<\/p>\n There is plenty of noise, too:\u00a0HALO<\/i>\u00a0is essentially a gigantic bass harp, playing a score derived from raw data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva. In 2015, CERN\u2019s art programme hosted Joe Gerhardt and Ruth Jarman, who make art under the name\u00a0Semiconductor<\/a>;\u00a0HALO<\/a>\u00a0is the most recent work to come out of that residency.<\/p>\n Its construction was\u00a0commissioned by Swiss watch-maker Audemars Piguet<\/a>, which has championed some of the biggest names in scientifically inflected art since 2012. In partnership with Art Basel, Europe\u2019s biggest art fair, the company has backed the strangest projects. Take\u00a0Robin Meier<\/a>\u2018s jungle-like installations, inspired by the synchronous flashes of fireflies; or\u00a0Theo Jansen<\/a>\u2018s\u00a0Strandbeests<\/i>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0eerily lifelike<\/a>\u00a0and intentional automata made of recycled plastic.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t mere \u201csponsorship\u201d; it\u2019s Renaissance-style patronage. The company\u2019s engagement with and promotion of artists extends well beyond the launch of any individual artwork.<\/p>\n Once\u00a0HALO<\/i>\u00a0has stopped reverberating, Jarman talks about how Semiconductor got started 20 years ago. \u201cWe were interested in matter, and how science provides us with the tools to perceive matter and material processes that would otherwise be hidden from us,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Acts of perception matter to artists, while scientists are more interested in the information those perceptions contain.\u00a0HALO<\/i>\u00a0came about, Gerhardt recalls, through the artists\u2019 desire to work with readings that were as close to natural perception as possible, before all the artefacts and noise are stripped away. \u201cWe spent three months working through the hierarchy \u2013 fighting our way to the vault, if you like,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a point not lost on Olivier Audemars,\u00a0HALO<\/i>\u2018s patron. Although neither he nor his colleagues are directly involved in the commissioning process, he is as fascinated with science as with the art his company supports. The first scientists took their measures and concepts of time from the watch-makers, he explains the day after\u00a0HALO<\/i>\u2018s unveiling. \u201cThe greatest names in science used this analogy of the watch-maker to explain their vision of the universe, including Einstein of course, with his claim that God does not play dice with the universe,\u201d Audemars says. \u201cThough in that case,\u201d he smiles, \u201cit seems he was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Technical and scientific interests drive a company like his, and shape its culture. \u201cIf I have an interest in cosmology and quantum physics, it\u2019s because I\u2019ve had those conversations, with my parents, even my grandparents.\u201d<\/p>\n The artists who win commissions are invited to the company\u2019s headquarters in the Swiss town of Le Brassus, and seem to fall quickly under their patron\u2019s spell. Art history is not short of examples of this sort of arrangement going horribly wrong. But then, not every patron is a watch-maker, whose employees must couple art and science, mechanism and craft.<\/p>\n Jansen\u2019s\u00a0Strandbeests (on show this week in Singapore)<\/i>\u00a0are mechanism personified. Meier\u2019s fields of artificial fireflies (last seen earlier this year in Thailand) are governed by how neighbouring pendulums synchronise. And\u00a0HALO<\/i>\u00a0is a homage to the LHC \u2013 the largest machine in history \u2013 and a homage made mostly of one-off, handcrafted parts. The fact that on maps the LHC resembles a giant watch is, surely, just a coincidence.<\/p>\n At this year\u2019s Art Basel, the walls of the Audemars Piguet collectors\u2019 lounge displayed recent works by the Italian-born, London-based artist\u00a0Davide Quayola<\/a>. The company invited Quayola, whose work uses new technologies in unfamiliar ways, to take pictures around Le Brassus. The upshot was\u00a0Remains \u2013 outsize<\/a>, phenomenally high-resolution images of dense woodland, generated by laser scanning.<\/p>\n Quayola says that he wanted to look at the valley, not with his own eyes, but through the eyes of a machine. He goes on: \u201cI wanted to hand over to the machine the traditional activity of walking out into the landscape in search of an encounter with nature. For me, technology is not a tool. I prefer to think of it as a collaborator, engaging with things in ways unique to itself.\u201d<\/p>\n It is a collaboration of equals, although initially the machines had the upper hand. \u201cScanning the valley using lidar technology was much more complicated than I had expected,\u201d Quayola admits.<\/p>\n First there was the sheer amount of time required, with each scan taking some 10 minutes as the \u201ccamera\u201d turns full circle, shooting out tens of millions of laser beams. And then there are the readings it gathers, which only make sense from one vantage point. To really capture the environment can take up to 60 scans for a single patch of forest. There\u2019s a final complication: all those scans must be correctly linked to yield a coherent map of an area constantly being buffeted by the weather.<\/p>\n The resulting images are clearly not photographs, but equally clearly are not the product of the human eye. Get up close to this cloud of points and you can distinguish each constituent; the image can not only be seen, but read. Parallel rays spill from a clump of foliage, an artefact of an uncorrected optical occlusion. And a dark, knotted surface turns out to be built up from strangely wobbly rows and columns of dots representing \u201cthin\u201d data, revealing the raw back-and-forth of the scanning process.<\/p>\n From an ordinary distance, what is startling about these works is the total absence of lines in an image that is so obviously detailed. The lidar eye has no interest in edges and planes, yet it is \u201cseeing\u201d with an acuity we immediately recognise as close to, or even better than, our own.<\/p>\n Quayola, of course, did much more than set his machines running. Since laser scanning results in a vast Excel spreadsheet, he used a computer to render the data as point clouds and then spent a while moving through them digitally, selecting the angles and frames he wanted to work on. It\u2019s an odd process \u2013 \u201clike being a traditional photographer, stranded somehow in a purely digital realm\u201d, he says.<\/p>\n Audemars Piguet does not own what it commissions.\u201dThe work belongs to the artist,\u201d says Audemars. \u201cThat way, the project can continue to grow.\u201d\u00a0HALO<\/i>, for instance, is getting a more flexible tuning mechanism, while camera drones are contributing to the next version of\u00a0Remains<\/i>. \u201cWe can\u2019t predict the life course of these projects, and we wouldn\u2019t want to,\u201d he says. \u201cArtists give us new ways of seeing the world. If that process is out of our hands, good. Why would we want to spoil the surprise?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Skipping merrily about the Vallee de Joux for New Scientist,\u00a030 June 2018 IT\u2019S not often that artists presenting new work ask for the lights to be turned off, but here it makes sense. We hunker in the dark of hall … Continue reading ![\"Courtesy-of-the-artist-and-Audemars-Piguet--(30)\"](\"https:\/\/d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/25135254\/courtesy-of-the-artist-and-audemars-piguet-301-800x533.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
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