metrySym

Project realised together with Marta PCampos during a one-month residency in May 2016 @ Etopia Center for Art and Technology (Zaragoza, Spain) in the frame of the Reverberadas Art & Science Exhibition.

metrysym.tumblr.com/

Symmetry stands for balance, perfection and beauty. Symmetric shapes and objects attract each other reestablishing the ideal equilibrium. The ideal of symmetry is also consistently followed and investigated in physics. This led to the concept of antimatter, which has been discovered and proved in the early 20th century.

Nowadays research on antimatter takes place at the particle accelerator in CERN, where massive amounts of energy and huge machines generating the strongest magnetic fields are used. The aesthetics of these machines are consequently followed by the installation’s setup. An electromagnetic field keeps the object levitating and attracted to the upper part of the device. This levitation is correlated to the fact that antimatter vanishes in a big burst of energy, when coming into contact with matter.

One of the main questions presented by this artifact is: ‘How would gravity affect antimatter? Would it fall upwards?’ Since its discovery, scientists wondered about the behaviour between antimatter and gravity, without any conclusive result yet. ‘metrySym’ theorizes about the idea, that antimatter would react to gravity differently than visible matter. Until now, this question has not been answered, due to the decay of real antimatter within seconds in current experiments.

By moving the hand in the lower part, the audience can control the displacement of the apple in the XY axis and interact with it remotely.

An article describing the installation was published in the book "The Practice of Art and Science"

REALIZED WITH

  • vvvv
  • Leap Motion
  • Arduino