SUN DOG

A visual research on the first scientific experiment to reproduce on Earth the nuclear fusion processes of the Sun and to create a potentially inexhaustible source of energy: a mirage of progress and power which finds its oldest reflections in solar cults

SUN DOG

A Sun Dog, also called “parhelion”, “false sun” or “double sun”, is an atmospheric optical phenomenon consisting of the appearance of two replicas of the image of the Sun, placed horizontally on either side of it.

"How to call them? Images of the sun? Historians call them suns and say they appeared two or three at once. The Greeks define them “parhelia” because they are generally seen near the Sun or because they are characterized by some resemblance to the Sun. In fact, they do not reproduce all the characteristics of the Sun, but its size and shape; after all, faint and evanescent, they have nothing of its warmth."

  Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones (around AD 65)

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This project began in 1926, when the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington suggested that the stars would derive their energy from the transformation of hydrogen into helium. Three years later, two physicists Robert Atkinson and Fritz Houtermans confirm that a large quantity of energy could be obtained thanks to the fusion of atomic nuclei. In 1932, the first nuclear fusion on Earth is realized by Mark Oliphant at the University of Cambridge.

Since that date, nuclear fusion has thus represented the Holy Grail for the world scientific community. It is the mirage of a clean and almost inexhaustible source of energy which would – theoretically – solve the current energy problems, in particular those related to atmospheric pollution and the consumption of fossil fuels. But to achieve this mirage, we must build a Sun on our planet. Nuclear fusion is indeed the source of energy for stars: thanks to the enormous heat and gravitational pressure that lies at the core of these stellar bodies, the hydrogen nuclei collide. They then fuse into heavier helium atoms and then release huge amounts of energy.

Following almost a century of research, this utopia with promethean resonances is now in progress in the Durance Valley, in France. ITER – acronym of “International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor”, but also “the way” in Latin – is the main international research on nuclear fusion and the world's most ambitious attempt to replicate the Sun's fusion processes to create energy on Earth. Fusion will take place inside an experimental machine, a “tokamak”, whose core is made up of a ring-shaped vacuum chamber. Inside, under the influence of extreme temperature and pressure, hydrogen gas turns into plasma, the state of matter in which hydrogen atoms can fuse and generate energy. The charged particles of the plasma can only be controlled thanks to a massive magnetic field placed around the tokamak in order to keep them away from the walls so that they do not melt. The temperature of the plasma produced at ITER will in fact reach 150.000.000°C, ten times higher than the temperature measured at the core of the Sun.

Born in the 80s and promoted by Donald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev as a symbol of a new desire for collaboration between the two superpowers, the construction of the ITER complex started in 2013. The first plasma with hydrogen isotopes is planned for 2035. If the experiment is positive, the ITER reactor will be tested for about 30 years then dismantled: a new experimental reactor – which will try to convert fusion energy into commercial energy – will be built in Japan, starting from 2065. With an estimated final cost between 22 and 65 billion euros, ITER represents the most expensive scientific experiment of all time and the most complex engineering project in human history.

Since the beginning of the ITER project, I have been fascinated by its anthropological and mythical implications. Indeed, the Sun has never been only a source of heat or light for humanity, but an archetype on which the history of human civilizations all over the world has been built. Nothing that is human is foreign to him. The notion of time, the invention of religions, the birth of fundamental concepts such as life and death are anthropologically linked to the daily appearance of our star in the celestial vault.

In the field, my attention is focused on the scientific, symbolic and conceptual elements of the experimentation carried out on the ITER site: ultramodern machines, technological inventions, symbols of time, allusions to monuments and solar cults, the microscopic as an analogy of the macroscopic, darkness as a space for the manifestation of light, and of course its visual declinations. But in the impossibility of reproducing the size of the construction and the temporal scale of this immense experimentation, the photographic image then proceeds according to the principle of the fragment, which, as in archaeology, can both represent a whole but, from fact of its incompleteness, also allows a broader interpretation for the one who observes it.

But this mythical-looking scientific experiment – of which no one dares to guarantee the success and of which the most pessimistic fear the failure – pushes me to try to capture by myself an image of this unwatchable star, of this celestial object on which we can fix the gaze only in the rare moment of its eclipse, in order to produce an image of it that is “my own”. Since two year, I am taking photographs of pseudo-scientific experiments intended to reproduce solar visual phenomena based on images produced by astrophysical researches and missions; I archive objects exhumed as in an excavation campaign on the ITER site, in order to constitute an “archeology of the future”; also, in an attempt always doomed to failure, I try by the photographic medium to have a “real” image of the star, trying photographing the Sun by myself and pushing at the limits the photosensitive materials. But then I am confronted with the inappropriateness of the medium, linked to the imposition of its physical characteristics: its light destroys photosensitive supports and its “image” is a black hole circumscribed by burnt edges. But this Icarian-like failure has heuristic value: it allows me to experience visibly the physical notions of time and space, to test the limits of the photographic medium and to overcome the spatial and temporal constraints that documentation imposes.

While following the same ambition as that of ITER – the creation of a Sun on Earth – my project aims to be a space of visual exploration conducted through the prisms of mirage and myth. What we see is then no longer so much a photographic document as a visual essay, an experience exploring the capacity of the photographic medium to look at the unwatchable: an image is no longer just a document, but an omen on which to build new understandings of the economic, anthropological and social changes in our society.