Kat Austen, Culture Lab editor
(Image: CERN, Walking for art's sake/Une d?marche pour l'art)
WEARING a black T-shirt and jeans, and a ring that he made himself, Michael Doser belies the stereotypical view of his vocation as an antimatter physicist. "The public image of scientists is of boffins in lab coats working unimaginatively in their labs, but that's only half of the story," he says.
Doser's position at the prestigious CERN laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland, is one that qualifies him to comment on creativity in physics research. "You have to work [very diligently] to tease out the subtle signals that you want to see - but at the same time you have to have some enthusiasm, some drive, some creativity, some craziness."
Productive creativity is the common ground on which the lab's Great Arts for Great Science cultural policy is built. Led by Ariane Koek, head of international arts development at CERN, the initiative is designed to "put art and science on the same cultural level".
Key to the initiative is an artist residency programme announced last month that builds on a legacy of visiting artists such as sculptor Antony Gormley and photographer Andreas Gursky. The programme aims to make CERN's cultural links official by supporting projects in two strands: dance and performance, and digital arts. The latter will be administered in conjunction with Futurelab, the research and design hub of the digital culture festival Ars Electronica, where I caught up with Doser in early September.
It's not surprising that Doser is so enthusiastic about the scheme. He takes inspiration from his day job to make jewellery: the ring adorning his middle finger contains a 1970s bubble chamber image - which shows the pathways of subatomic particles through a superheated liquid - hidden behind an opaque gemstone.
Like Doser, Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's director of research and scientific computing, holds the view that science is inherently creative. He argues that both researchers and artists like experimentation, and don't like "to accept paradigms that, up to now, have been accepted by everyone".
Many scientists like to explore "every corner of creativity", adds Bertolucci, who is an avid guitarist himself. He also believes that the culture gap is particularly narrow in the case of particle physics. "The definition of time and space has been one of the key points in physics for centuries. If you look to Giotto, Matisse or Picasso you see that there is an evolution of how to explore the dimensions of space and time."
Nevertheless, Koek decided that three months should be the maximum length of time for an artist to stay at CERN. "I discovered there's a funny point, particularly with particle physics, where the artist loses confidence," she says, citing her 2009 feasibility study, which showed that artists' work can suffer after a prolonged residency. "When they're working with physicists, there's a tipping point where artists want to prove that they have the brains of the physicist. The minute they do that they start to lose their artistic creativity."
Koek's study also showed that CERN researchers previously felt disconnected from the artists who visited. Her solution for the new initiative is to assign each artist a scientist mentor, and for the artists to hold monthly workshops to engage their hosts.
Some might argue that artistic workshops are a distraction from the pursuit of the still elusive Higgs boson, or worry that some of CERN's creative talent might defect to the art world, but Bertolucci holds out great hopes for the programme's impact. The folks at CERN are excited about the forthcoming cultural blizzard, he tells me. "Most of them are very happy. Scientists are a fun bunch of people," he grins.
Bertolucci thinks that rubbing shoulders with artists will challenge researchers to look at their subject in a new way, guarding against complacency at the world-renowned institution. "A person who has a strong will to understand, and to express through different ways what we are doing, might help, in very unpredictable ways, people who are doing it technically," he says. "You might get embarrassing questions."
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