Symphony of Chances

In the beginning there was light, but nothing was there to see it. This light was energy, the same of which the entire universe, the elementary particles and us are made of.

Symphony of Chances starts from this energy to explore the limits of sight and how they trigger the speculative process that leads researchers to imagine the beyond, and science to overcome its boundaries. Imagination as the driving force for the construction of knowledge and the research for answers to our fundamental questions.

But imagination has been fairly recently reintegrated into the scientific discourse, after going through controversial times, especially in the modern period. It has been considered a dangerous human faculty, and condemned by Christianity as the origin of idolatry, becoming the door for the “cupiditas oculorum”. In the age of reason, it was the enemy of rationality and labeled with the stigma of being one of the weaknesses of human nature. Obsolete and ancillary, it became the origin of the fear of losing control over reality, making its relationship with the scientific production of knowledge extremely difficult.

This ongoing body of work has been developed in collaboration with scientific institutes such as the Fair/GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research (GER), the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology (GER) and the Ithaca Observatory (USA). Part of the images are made in their labs, and part of them are created in my studio. These latter are the consequence of conversations I had with many scientists, during which they shared their research, their ideas of what they can’t technologically see and how they imagine it to be.

A scientific imaginative journey that is leading me through the unknown genesis of our ever-expanding universe, to the unknown essence of what we are, but also an attempt to represent what has not been seen yet, recalling the predictive practices of sci-fi narratives in between scientific facts and imagination.

The PhMuseum grant will allow me to complete this body of work researching in other institutes in Europe such as the LNGS in Italy, the CERN in Switzerland and the Escape project in France.

The images of this series are all photographs. The project doesn’t involve the use of computer graphic processes.