by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

Today Ivan Bianchi, professor of Contemporary art at the University of Padova, visited along with the AMVA4NewPhysics network coordinator the Liceo “Marco Foscarini” in Venice, to assess the status of the projects produced by the students for the “Arte & Scienza” contest.

The project has been described previously. In a nutshell, it foresees artistic work by high-school students, inspured by high-energy physics at the LHC and the Higgs boson discovery. The best artworks will be exposed during the EPS conference at the Palazzo del Casinò of the Lido of Venice between July 5th and July 13th, and the three winning ones will receive prizes sponsored by the AMVA4NewPhysics network.

The quality of the works, some of which already completed, others close to completion, was found excellent. It looks like it will be difficult to select those that will be exposed during EPS. In this post we present one work by Lilian Mendicino and Denise Patrizi, titled “L’universo tra le dita” (The universe between my fingers).

The work represents Peter Higgs, his hands holding a collision event generating the Higgs boson. It is produced in three-dimensions with iron wire on a black wooden stand. Working with iron wire it is challenging to give 3D feeling to the assembly, but the students have done a great job. The pictures unfortunately do not convey very well the real appearance of the sculpture.

The artists also produced a text to explain their work. Here is a quick and dirty translation:

This work has been conceived such that, through the use of simple materials such as iron wire, complex concepts can emerge. In this sculpture are represented hands that hold the graphical representation of the collision between particles; they can be interpreted as Man holding between his hands the quality of his discoveries.

Particles this small may be detected in the study of proton collisions, but the probability to put them in evidence are tiny. This is why we decided to make them permanent with this sculpture – to pay tribute to who in such a big universe has sought for the tiniest things.

This work was selected to be exposed to the Casinò di Venezia at Lido during the EPS conference, July 5th to 12th, and it participates in the final selection of the best artworks by Venice high-school students.

Here are the artists with their work, and some close-ups: