The artwork “gamma” reflects on electromagnetic radiation by making the spectrum visible to the human eye, light, tangible. It does this by capturing and refracting a beam of light using a glass window. This creates optical phenomena, which can be represented by motifs. One such motif is woven into a tablecloth. 

 

The title of the work, “gamma”, is the name of the elementary particle in the standard model of particle physics that carries the electromagnetic force, the photon. It is called the “light particle” and is denoted by the letter “gamma”. 

 

The peculiar thing about electromagnetism is that it is not subject to the classical laws of physics. Michael Faraday, the English scientist (1791-1867) who discovered the relationship between electricity, magnetism and light, first described the “ideomotor effect” or unconscious muscle movements in 1853, following research into the “table roulante”, which was very popular in the 19th century. Participants (including Pierre and Marie Curie, documented a century later) in a “séance” understood a table rotating on its axis as a supernatural presence. This movement was thought to be caused by fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, which thus became the object of supernatural practices. 

 

The glass window consists of strips of glass mounted across the width of the room's windows. Each of the strips is divided into several pieces of different widths and cut at different angles. When sunlight enters the glass window at the right angle, the light is refracted into its constituent colours. Are those magical shadows the embodiment of a supernatural presence? Or can they be explained by particle physics?

 

The tablecloth consists of a chessboard pattern that is interrupted by axes that optically disrupt the pattern. It must be positioned so that these axes correspond to the central axes of the house. In this way, the tablecloth acts as an index of the light falling on the window.

 

The chessboard pattern is a reference to the arithmetic logic of the binary system, where each cell of the 8 rows and 8 columns can contain either a 0 or a 1, and Duchamp's theory of the ‘infrathin’, whose search for singularity was embodied by his passion for chess. In this way, the motif unites two opposites: the calculable and the incalculable.

 

By drawing on light and optical motifs, the artwork challenges our powers of perception. The visibility of “gamma” depends on the position of the viewer, who thus becomes a kinetic parameter in its perception.