Squaring the Circle: An Intuitive Solution of the Impossible
29 July 2014
The artist Attila Csorgő discussing with the scientist Stavros Katsanevas in June 2012
Science since the start has tried to apply patterns of order on reality. In fact, it is well known that the word cosmos denotes “order or pattern” in ancient Greek, and had an aesthetic meaning at the root for instance of what we still call “cosmetics”. The ancient commentators say that Pythagoras was the first to apply this word of aesthetic origin to the totality of things, postulating at the same time that the cosmos and our soul are made of number, establishing thus the first “harmonic” cosmology. Closer to us, Galileo, said that the Universe is written in mathematical language, whose letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures.
It has also been known since antiquity, that every system of order, every language mathematical or not, leaves a remainder, a yet unconceptualised part that instead of being a source of pessimism, anxiety or irrationalism to the scientist or the artist, opens new channels of research and eventually a synthesis at a higher level. Between these paradigmatic puzzles we have the squaring of the circle and the existence of the irrationals in the mathematics of antiquity and closer to us the riddles at the heart of astroparticle physics and cosmology: the nature of dark matter and energy or what is the connection between the infinitely small and the infinitely large, or in technical terms how the different scales of distance and energy of the Universe are connected.
“Astroparticle Physics is close to the Pascalian dilemma of the two infinities also through another point,” says Pr. Katsanevas, director of the Laboratoire AstroParticule et Cosmologie (APC)1 , “Pascal said: through space I am contained in the Universe as a mere point, but through thought I can contain it 2“. In fact, since 1912 and the discovery of the cosmic rays we extended the projective information we receive from the Universe beyond astronomer’s light to cosmic ray particles, neutrinos, radio waves, gravitational waves and why not in the future dark matter particles. It is amazing, how humankind embedded in space vessel Earth, by intercepting the cosmic messages incident on its surface, can reconstruct the events in the full volume of the Universe and even its history, that is reconstruct the full spatio-temporal continuum. We could thus say”, adds smiling, “that cosmic ray physics was the first experimental application … of the holographic principle, in vogue these days in theory.”
Study for Squaring the Circle, 2012, courtesy Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin/Ljubljana
These ideas urged in 2011 Stavros Katsanevas then deputy director of IN2P3/CNRS and Pierre Binétruy then director of APC, to commission a piece of art, with the help of the Fondation de France3 and the Gallery Jerome Poggi4, commemorating the 2012 celebration of a century since the first measurement of cosmic rays by the Austrian physicist Victor Franz Hess. They rightly thought that one had to go beyond the mere illustration of the process and that only art could express the complexity of a phenomenon lying between physics and metaphysics. Attila Csörgő seems to have resolved ingeniously the famous problem of mathematics5through his installation Squaring the Circle in a scientific, yet allegoric manner, using a complicated set of mirrors so that a circular disk casts a squared shadow on the ground. Csörgő’s symbolism represents a minimalistic, conceptual and poetic cosmos, the subjective solution to an objective impossibility.
“The works of Attila resemble the scientific process in this: both are uncertain as to the final result and the success of the approach. The ecstasy of the moment of discovery after a long path of research, often called the Catharsis of Eureka, is another common point between science and art testified in Attila’s works. The Squaring the Circle was not at all a pre-determined success, not from the point of view of aesthetics but as far as the technique that had to be developed was concerned. Attila had many technical problems to resolve, using not a computer but merely a pencil and his mind. The result is truly admirable!” says Pr. Katsanevas.
Csörgő used his intuition and artistic perception, along with algebraic calculations and geometrical concepts, to combine different physical phenomena in a three-dimensional structure which represents the incarnation of scientific knowledge in an artistic expression. His first project was a kinetic installation and not a static one as we see in the APC: “I had realised that due to the water’s transparency we cannot really see the oscillation of its surface but only its moving image (reflection) when it is strongly illuminated. This gave me the idea to experiment with wave reflexions on a liquid surface and to create a special source of light using a concave mirror to reflect and deviate the light rays in such a manner so as to transform the circular waves to square reflections. The mirror concept was decisively the most difficult aspect of the project” remembers Csörgő.
Attila Csörgő, Squaring the Circle, 2012-14, Photography: Nils Klinger
“The piece transforms the concentric ripples created by regular drops of water into quadratic shapes concave mirror places above the water basin. Illuminated by bulb, the work allows the viewer to observe the gradual transformation of the image on the surface, as the circular shapes begin to grow and slowly turn into squares. Following a strong line of similar explorations starting with Spiral Wave (1993), Squaring the Circle continues Csörgő’s investigations into light and motion, adding to a profound meditation on how our vision of reality is constructed” (Livia Paldi in Eva Scharrer, Katrin Sauerländer, dOCUMENTA (13), das Begleitbuch = the guidebook, éd. Hatje Cantz, 2012).
Squaring the Cirle resides at APC on a permanent installation, after the presentation of a first prototype in the Documenta exhibition at Kassel in 2012, its inauguration in March 2014 at the Museum of Modern Art (Palais de Tokyo) in Paris where it became the focus of a round table discussion between the 2006 Physics Nobel Prize astrophysicist George Smoot and the science philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour.
ATTILA CSÖRGŐ (born 1965) is one of the most important Hungarian artists of his generation. He lives and works in Warsaw. His work explores the territory between science and art in a passionate yet playful manner. He takes us to his virtual universe of unexpected physical phenomena, illusions that challenge ordinary perceptions and the perceived reality of the physical world. He does this through the mechanical constructions that he creates on his own, animated structures which propose unexpected solutions to known physical problems. He gets his inspirations from the physical phenomena and their mathematical/geometrical descriptions, and acts upon them with the methodology and curiosity of a scientist along with the open spirit and esthetic of an artist.
1 The Laboratoire AstroParticule et Cosmologie was established in 2005 and it is a laboratory of IN2P3/CNRS, of the University Paris VII Denis Diderot, of CEA and of the Observatoire de Paris.
2 …par l’espace, l’Univers me comprend et m’engloutit comme un point ; par la pensée, je le comprends.
3 The Fondation de France supports concrete and innovative projects that respond to the needs of people facing problems link to the rapid evolution of society.
4 Gallery J. Poggi Founder of the association Objet de Production
5«Squaring the Circle» was one of the three major problems of classical geometry, which came to us from ancient Greece. People for centuries were fascinated about it, when in 1882 it was actually proved to be irresolvable. The expression “squaring the circle” is today a metaphor for a task that is impossible to achieve.