installation, video, sound, tactile box
dimensions variable
somewhere
2017
[…] The paradox of building huge machines to demonstrate the existence of something invisible to human eyes, but through calculations and numbers. The spoken language has its ultimate inadequacy once it needs to describe complexities such as atomic and sub-atomic realities.
The video is about the connection between quantum physics and blindness. Sight is the first granted parameter to analyse realities. Therefore, the idea is developed to “darken the vision” to understand particles and quanta differently.
The title of the film refers to the number 137, which is a pure, indivisible number. The number 137 is eventually a meaningful number. It can be resumed as the relation between Light and Matter. It is the relation between the speed of light and the speed of electrons orbiting around the nucleus of the hydrogen atom. In other words, it is possible to imagine these two poles, Light from one side and Matter from the other side and in the middle the number 137. In the study of Kabbalah, the number 137 is the numeric correspondence of the word Kabbalah(Quf-Beit-Lamet-Hey=100-2-30-5) and the meaning of the word Kabbalah is “correspondence”, “parallelism”.
The title of the film is also a gentle reminder of Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, an Austrian-Swiss physicist and American naturalised citizen after WWII, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1945. He had a true passion for the number 137, constantly meditating about its meaning. When Pauli’s assistant visited the theorist in the hospital room in which he was placed prior to his fatal operation, Pauli instructed the assistant to note the number on the door as he left the room. The number was 137.
Mostly shoot at CERN in Geneva, it shows the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), which consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets located 100 metres underground, as well as other rooms and laboratories at ground level around CERN’s base camp.
In order of appearance:
Otto Lechner, musician
Alberto Toti, skater
Sezen Sekmen, physicist
Isabella Staino, painter
