Flashes of Cosmic Brilliance Tim Otto Roth’S Minimalist Art Installation Reflects the Complexity of Cosmic Radiation, Explains Martin Kemp

OPINION NATURE|Vol 458|16 April 2009

The Amygdaloids performed tunes from their I Don’t Want My Brain Cut In Two, refers to a geneticist Pardis Sabeti, of Boston-based band new album, Brainstorm, some of which explore drastic procedure once used to treat epilepsy. Thousand Days. Among the professional how love can disrupt normal thought process- Levitin says his experiences in the recording musicians was guitarist Lenny Kaye, who has ing. In Crime of Passion, a jealous lover’s rage industry now inform his work in the lab. “I was recorded with punk singer Patti Smith, and momentarily overwhelms his rational thinking: always astonished by how long it takes to make Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider. “Sentenced to death for a crime I did commit/I a three-minute song, and how many times you Wainwright held nothing back in his set. He couldn’t stop/I did it in a fit/of anger and pain.” have to record to get it right.” He explains that professed he “failed every science course [he] Cognitive psychologist, vocalist and guitarist he has to be similarly patient when repeating ever took”, but supported the charity gig because Daniel Levitin of McGill University in Montreal, experiments or redrafting a research paper. “scientists have become the new oppressed peo- Canada, sang a scientific homage to the 1989 Other scientist performers included ple, and I’m always there for the oppressed.” ■ hit Wicked Game in which Chris Isaak croons neuroscientist and classical guitarist David Roxanne Khamsi is news editor at Nature “No, I don’t want to fall in love.” Levitin’s version, Sulzer, known on stage as Dave Soldier, and Medicine in New York. Flashes of cosmic brilliance Tim Otto Roth’s minimalist art installation reflects the complexity of cosmic radiation, explains Martin Kemp.

Daylight is fading over a grass-covered the particles’ energies are transmitted field. Looking like extra-large bee hives, back into the space through which 252 white cabins on short stilts are reg- they have cascaded. ularly distributed across its vast expanse When Roth categorizes his work of 44,000 square metres. A larger ‘house’ as minimalist, he is referring to the occupies the space of the central 4 units. reductive mode in art and music that At the centre of each square block of arose in the late 1960s. It relies on the 16 cabins is set a two-tier, highly reflec- stripping down of a composition into tive, cylindrical device. basic units, often regularly repeated As darkness envelops the array, short- and frequently mathematical in form. lived flashes of light erupt unpredictably From the repetition and regularity, M. BREIG/FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM KARLSRUHE M. BREIG/FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM from the 16 devices. Sometimes one paradoxical variousness and complex- launches alone. At other times they Cosmic-ray showers ity emerge when the viewer moves or evoke straight lines, or neat clusters. Or trigger a light display at the lighting changes. Reflective sur- just flicker here and there. The flashes the KASCADE array. faces are particularly favoured. are so rapid and apparently random that The generation of complexity from our eyes search in vain for a repeated pattern. of around 1014–1017 electronvolts (eV; one eV is simplicity parallels those physical phenomena Logic appears to be defied. What are we witness- equivalent to the energy acquired by an electron that fall under the embrace of chaos theory, and ing? A high-tech scientific experiment? Some falling through a difference in potential of one mirrors the reverse processes of measurement, sci-fi setting for a war of the worlds? An evoca- volt). Together with other detector units distrib- as when the unpredictable complexity of the tion of a night-time bombing raid? uted across the research centre, the KASCADE- particle showers are first trapped in the grids of We are, in fact, watching a minimalist- Grande experiment can detect energies as high detectors and then registered in the LED arrays style art installation by German artist Tim as 1018 eV. The results are recorded in a central in the lab. The chaos of the flashes in Roth’s Otto Roth. His Cosmic Revelation (see http:// laboratory by neat grids of LEDs. KASCADE’s apparatus is placed in a subtle dialogue with tinyurl.com/cosrev) presents a sensory scientists can view the topographical display of both the phenomenon itself and the manner experience of the cosmic radiation data received by all 252 cabins live on of its recording. detected by the KASCADE project the Internet. The ancient followers of Pythagoras char- at the Centre for Elementary Parti- Roth’s 16 strobe-light units are in acterized the harmonics of cosmic energy as cle and Astroparticle Physics at the themselves pieces of high-tech sculp- the “music of the spheres”. The mathematical Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, ture that come into their own as beau- foundations lay in the proportional system Germany. Roth’s installation is both tiful objects during daylight hours. A of the musical scale and in the perfections of an artwork and an act of science 1,500-watt linear flash tube in each Euclidean geometry. Here, by contrast, we communication. And it interacts in unit is protected from the weather stand as witnesses to the chaotic drumbeats an unexpected and compelling way with the by the upper disc. A convex mirror is set into of cosmic radiation. The new music is that of systematic recording of cosmic phenomena. the lower disc so as to project the pulses of light quantum mechanics and complexity — proba- The cabins contain detectors for the ele- radially from the cylinder’s open sides. bilistic rather than deterministic. A new art is mentary particles that move at speeds close These ‘cosmic mirrors’ carry the visual out- encoding a new science. ■ to that of light and crash incessantly into our puts of the laboratory apparatus back into the Martin Kemp is emeritus professor in history of atmosphere. These multiple collisions initi- field of the outdoor detectors, transforming art at the University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. ate cascades of millions of new particles, and the energies of the unseen into wavelengths KASCADE measures those that have energies accessible to human sight. Thus transformed, See also page 847 and www.nature.com/astro09.