Particle physicist James Beacham and conceptual artist Ilona Ruegg reflect on the gap between the seen and the unseen and compare notes on their respective working methods.

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Ilona Ruegg, detail of Property, 2020, cut corner from steel safe. Images courtesy of the artist.

I had known the work of Swiss artist Ilona Ruegg only by reputation until I met her in 2018 at an ethereal violin performance by Walter Fähndrich in a modernist church in Basel. We were both in the audience, sitting among photographs of recently deceased animals—suspended between life and oblivion—that Thomas Struth had installed for Art Basel. The space and the performance encouraged quiet contemplation of the distance between human experience and the ineffable. Subsequently, encountering Ruegg’s work in person has been revelatory. 

For several decades, her conceptual projects have been mounted in the gap between the seen and the unseen, often taking the form of installations or interventions, but also photography, drawings, sculptural objects, and sound. We quickly discovered parallels and contrasts to my research as a particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva. Ruegg’s pieces are preoccupied with deconstructing existing apparatuses or systems to expose structures and rules clandestinely affecting us all, and with investigating the physical or temporal space between direct and indirect experience. This is also a pretty good description of experimental collider physics. 

I trained as a filmmaker before becoming a physicist, and my own films also negotiate between the known, the unknown, and the unknowable, and how our perception of these properties relates to human societies and endeavors. Art and science are two modes of human inquiry—two ways we ask and attempt to answer questions about the world around us—each inspired by that fiery, disorienting distance between experience and knowledge. I regularly host artist friends at CERN, and when Ilona visited at the beginning of 2020, we continued exploring these topics. 

Soon after her visit, Ilona invited me to an intervention in an apartment building in Zürich. I arrived to find, among other things, that all the doors of the (occupied) apartments in the building had been removed and collectively installed sideways into a single doorway on the ground floor. Ilona had negotiated with the tenants to borrow their doors in order to temporarily suspend their received notions of property, privacy, and security. Those of us gathered to witness the intervention lingered uneasily in the space between the experience—the impractical array of doors shoved like books into this passage—and the knowledge that the apartments upstairs were now doorless and exposed. My favorite art—like the best science—disorients and reorients. This past fall Ilona and I finally sat down to reorient ourselves for a recorded conversation. 

James Beacham, still from Untitled (Conduit Stage), 2021, video. Images courtesy of the artist.

James Beacham Here we are, in your studio in Zürich. Let me start off by asking, Did you come from an artistic family?

Ilona Ruegg Not at all, but there were influential things. My father photographed and developed photos at home in the bathroom. I assisted him and was able to see how images come into being, how something that was not there suddenly appeared.

As a child, I had a very interesting book about inventions, called The Miracles of the World. There was a part about X-rays with many little images that I had to glue in myself. There was another section about atoms and the circular movements of the electron around the nucleus that really fascinated me. Then somebody told me that everything—myself, what’s around me, and even the stars—is made in this way and that there’s just a lot of empty space in between things. I began to ask myself: Is it altogether the same? When I cycle to the lake, the electrons are cycling in my body but also within my bicycle—all the same cycling? This started perhaps my conscious interest in correlations and in differences or similarities.

JB So, already as a kid, you were interested in elucidating or making articulate the inarticulable or hard to explain. In a sense, you wanted to discover the hidden structures that are around us, whether they’re psychological or physical.

IR As a child, it’s very easy to disbelieve and to turn everything around and over with your imagination. I was curious about how things are made, what’s inside, and why. I was hungry for answers. I was in the library every week checking out books.

How about you? Did you grow up with science?

JB I was lucky having parents and extended family members who valued learning—science, art, literature, music, all these things. But I was also like you, I had this insatiable intellectual hunger. There would be certain questions I would ask that none of the adults around me had answers to. Now I’m a particle physicist, but I also trained as a filmmaker.

I think we particle physicists don’t really choose physics; physics chooses us. A particle physicist likely was the little kid who never accepted “That’s just the way it is” as an answer. As a child, when I would ask, “Why is the sky blue?” and was told, “Oh, that’s just the way it is,” I was never satisfied. I’d ask someone else. And if they didn’t know the answer, I’d go to the library and find an encyclopedia.

A particle physicist is the one who always asks the sort of how-and-why behind the how-and-why questions. Eventually, you get down to the smallest possible things, the uncuttable particles. And then you ask what’s smaller than that? And the answer is: we currently don’t know. And (snaps) that’s where I want to be with my research. My brain naturally goes there. Other scientists stop at certain places along the way—zoology, evolutionary biology, geology, chemistry … we’re getting smaller and smaller. But the particle physicist asks, “What’s smaller than that?”

IR It gets more existential. And maybe more abstract, too. As an artist, I’m driven by the question of what is obviously present—you could call it real—and what is not detectable or what escapes us. So, from this tension, I create what I call “situation models” that are part reality and part invention. I’m bringing about a transformation, starting with something given and altering it profoundly into something that was not tangible before—and this by adding almost nothing. 

Ilona Ruegg, Home Plot Series, 2016-2017, spray and brush on paper, 15 x 21.75 inches.

Illona Ruegg, Home Plot Series, 2016-2017, spray and brush on paper, 15 x 21.75 inches.

Ilona Ruegg, Home Plot Series, 2016-2017, spray and brush on paper, 15 x 21.75 inches.

Ilona Ruegg, Home Plot Series, 2016-2017, spray and brush on paper, 15 x 21.75 inches.

Ilona Ruegg, Home Plot Series, 2016-2017, spray and brush on paper, 15 x 21.75 inches.

Ilona Ruegg, Home Plot Series, 2016-2017, spray and brush on paper, 15 x 21.75 inches.

JB A few things come to mind when you say these words. The biggest question is, How do we determine what is real? How do we define and articulate that as humans? To go back to the old-fashioned image of the nucleus with an electron orbiting around and your realization that that’s what everyone and everything is made of, that’s what your bicycle is made of on the smallest possible scale. That to me is a level of detail which allows us, when we study this realm of individual particles and forces, to understand the basic rules by which the universe operates, by which everything comes together.

But like you intimated, that level of detail necessarily abstracts. I mean, if I zoom in on a proton in my leg, I have no idea where this proton is coming from. If all I see is a proton, I don’t know what it’s connected to, or what its significance is for a macroscopic, big human like me. In a sense, study on that level of detail is in the service of understanding the underlying laws and principles. And it’s fascinating because it’s both reductionist and universalizing. It makes it so that the protons and neutrons in you, and the protons and neutrons in me, and the protons and neutrons in a gazelle, they’re all identical. Like they’re literally identical. There’s no way to distinguish between them. I cannot tag a proton from a gazelle, and then take it to someone else and say, “Where did this proton come from?” And they say, “That came from a gazelle.” It’s impossible to do.

IR But every event or occurrence is different. There is no one that is totally repeatable. Maybe the experiment is repeatable but every created moment in it is different.

JB Do you mean every collision that we do in the Large Hadron Collider? Yes, each is different, for sure. You’ll never have an identical event. They’ll each have slightly different properties.

IR That’s a wonderful metaphor for life, because we are all made of the same particles, but we are very different. If mankind would only understand that we can be the same and very different at the same time, a lot of problems could be solved in a better way.

JB I agree. This universalizing aspect could be very powerful. But then, me talking about particle physics around the world has not solved structural racism or institutionalized misogyny. Not yet.

IR I can’t hope that art will change the world’s politics either but nevertheless, I will always try to speak of things or make things that are urgent to myself and to the world. And maybe in this encounter I can touch certain points. 

But particle science and art have a different approach as I understand it. I set up situations where I make the rules. I set up something artificial, something that doesn’t function in the way we are used to. I create situations where you can make new experiences with expanded or contradictory rules. Whereas in your research, you set up experiments to trace the inherent rules of the world itself, correct?

JB That’s true. We’re not creating anything new with particle physics. We are observing—hopefully observing— things that the universe already contains. The biggest discovery we’ve made in the last ten years or so is the Higgs boson particle. It’s an amazing particle, but we can’t control it, meaning that we can’t do anything with it, like make buildings with it or use it as an energy source. We can only detect it and measure its properties, and we do this simply because we’re curious about the universe. 

James Beacham, still from Untitled (106 and solenoid), 2021, video.

IR You have only one particle, don’t you?

JB Well, there’s only one Higgs boson in the sense that the Higgs boson particle is like a newly discovered species of particle, like a new species of turtle. You need to observe multiple individual new turtles to determine that you’ve discovered a new species. Similarly, the Higgs boson is produced in our proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at a rate that is fixed by nature—only some percentage of the time, a collision between two protons will make a Higgs boson.

IR Tell me again how the collisions happen.

JB The Large Hadron Collider is a 27-kilometer circular tunnel on the border of France and Switzerland, about 100 meters underground, and in this tunnel we use superconducting magnets colder than outer space to accelerate protons—the stuff we’re all made of—to nearly the speed of light and then we smash them together, briefly recreating the conditions of the universe as they were for a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. Along the ring of the collider, we build huge detectors. The experiment I work on is called ATLAS and it’s six stories high and 46 meters long, like an enormous soda can tipped on its side and filled with complicated electronics. But ATLAS doesn’t detect the particles we’re interested in, like the Higgs boson. It can only take a snapshot of the particles flying out from the collision. We do this quadrillions of times and we look for statistically significant patterns in the outgoing particles—but they are always a stand-in for the real thing we’re interested in, which we cannot ever see or detect directly.

JB Because it disappears too quickly. When a Higgs boson particle is produced in a proton collision, it lives for 0.0000000000000000000001 seconds before it decays. It’s not possible to collect this for anything. You’ll never hold a Higgs boson in your hand. And that, to me, is why this kind of research is so symbolically powerful. The discoveries we make can’t be harnessed for practical use—like products or energy sources—because the phenomena are so rare and fleeting.

IR You are always too late. (laughter) So, if I understand this right, you won’t see either the real Higgs boson or the real collision, but a translation in terms of data and visualization of data. And from the data, you can imagine what it really is.

JB Yes. There’s an intrinsic distance—temporal and spatial—between what we’re interested in, new particles like the Higgs boson, and what we can actually detect with our experiments. I find this ontological or epistemological gap simultaneously fascinating and immensely frustrating. There are several of your sculptural interventions, photography, and sound pieces that seem to also work within the space between the seen and the unseen, and how the presence of the former inter- faces with the desire for the latter. With physics, this gap is, like I said, intrinsic.

IR What interests me is that the thing you are after is not really in the center. It is more about what happens, could happen, or has happened. You have insights into a moment that is far beyond our lives, in the future or in the past. In visual arts, mostly, things have to be visual, have to be seen. It’s not that I want to avoid materials, or surface, or form, but I don’t understand those as the final point. What is made visible in the artwork is only an opening into a bigger relational field, where I want to invite a larger understanding of the objects’ expanded context within which contradictions can be engaged.

A recent work of mine is called The Unseen Series and it relates to what we are talking about. It stems from the installation Equation of Loss I made, which consists of two checkout conveyor belts—like in a supermarket— put up in a museum space in a totally wrong way. They were installed diagonally from the ground to the ceiling. Two removed parts were stacked behind lattice wall elements. For this next project, I went to the museum when it was closed, to document the work. But it wasn’t about documentation per se, somebody else did that for the record. I was interested in the disappearance of this installation by photographing it. So, I went very close up with a camera, or sometimes with my iPhone. My eye couldn’t see well anymore. But the iPhone could still see well and open very complex, new spaces that I didn’t invent. When I enlarged the photos, it seemed as if those resulting spaces could be entered and traversed. They appear partly liquid, or they don’t have the resistance we usually encounter—like with our body and other bodies and objects in the room.

JB You found a way to interrogate an object at a level of detail that disconnects that detail from the macroscopic object.

IR Indeed, it freezes the object, in a way. It’s not recognizable anymore. It loses its name. What we can name, we think we possess, or we can at least recognize. But if you go into fields where you don’t recognize anymore, you are free to enter in a new way.

I think we have to do that a lot in our reality today. Enter research spaces we don’t understand yet. I like to offer spaces you’re unfamiliar with, so you will have to use your own tools. The viewers have their own resources in themselves—like deep memory, knowledge, questions, intuition… 

Ilona Ruegg, The Unseen/Operated, 2021, Fine-art inkjet print on Canson Infinity Rag photo paper, 47.75 x 28.25 inches.

Ilona Ruegg, The Unseen/Continued, 2021, Fine-art inkjet print on Canson Infinity Rag photo paper, 47.75 x 28.25 inches.

Ilona Ruegg, Equation of Loss, 2020, on-sit installation with 2 checkout conveyor tables, 2 lift doors, 4 lattice wall elements, and register rolls.

JB When you embark on a new project, are there certain questions that you want the audience to ask when they come to it?

IR No, not before I start the work but sometimes I see old questions of mine reactivated in a work. I test these questions: Is there a form, a material, a plasticity I can go with? And then I learn from this plasticity. If I see questions arise myself, somebody else might also have these questions. But I don’t have a program for the audience. I learn from the work and then I release it and hope it will do something for others.

JB Were there particular artists who were significant influences or collaborators over the years? I can make my own guesses in terms of inspiration and connections, like, for example, I see potential influence from Eva Hesse in a lot of your work. Maybe not directly, but as part of the tradition.

IR I know the work of Eva Hesse quite well. I know her diary too. But more influential to me was Gordon Matta-Clark. Construction and deconstruction, the living space in it, the urban and social issues, the operational method, and all that. Jeff Wall interested me a lot too because his images are total constructions. It’s almost like particles put together for the final result, the total image. These works helped me to understand that I was on my own way, that I can be in conversation with them—not body-to-body but work-to-work.

JB There’s an installation you did that is very much related to the temporal component in both particle physics as a discipline and how humans think about the universe, the way we believe things happen through time. It was this lightbulb installation.

IR Yeah, it’s called Light in Wall. That work was a crucial piece for me. I was a painter before, but I left the canvas as an abstract location in order to set my work in the world, inside this ongoing process of which I’m only a particle. I took a very small light bulb from a torch and put it on a long-lasting battery. I put the battery inside the wall, closed it, and also embedded the bulb. It was the only thing visible, flush to the wall, like a finger coming out. I set it in motion, and I called it a work for the duration that the bulb is burning, but also for the duration it is not burning anymore. And I felt I now had this extension of time, in a way that was not measurable. Also, the being and not being were in relation together, and it wasn’t a positive and a negative space, but they were entwined. With that piece I felt, Yes, this is my work, I arrived at where my true interests are.

JB People would be walking up a staircase and see a little light and think, “What in the world is this light doing here?”

IR Yeah, it was on a landing and not totally apparent. The light was quite low, forty centimeters from the ground. I was brought up Catholic and we were always told that there was this eternal light that would never go out. So, this work is also in relation to that doctrine. Now I could express my own understanding of duration and light, and of what beginning and ending could be.

JB That’s really fascinating. A lot of us were raised, sometimes against our will, in religious traditions, and there is this notion of the immortal soul, not just in Christianity, but in other traditions as well. And that, to me as a physicist, doesn’t make sense. We can’t even define what it means to have a soul. Of course, from a poetic perspective, I understand what we mean but as something that’s literally, physically real, it doesn’t make sense at all. To me, the religious tradition of the immortal soul does a disservice to humans as it opposes this wonderful thing where each individual human that arises into existence has a finite time span. It’s beautiful because it decenters. To me, the notion of the immortal soul is a very selfish and hubristic idea. I recognize that death is part of life, and that I’m a finite individual being, but my particles will continue to exist after I’m dead. They will become part of other forms and do other things. That, to me, is far more powerful and profound than this notion of immortality and the eternal.

I like how your project explicitly says that there is importance to this: “As the artist, I am asserting that this is an artwork that exists while the light bulb is burning. There will be a point when the bulb is not burning anymore but that artwork still exists because I made it so, even when the bulb is not burning.” That to me is very profound. It’s almost as though I, as a human, can say: This collection of particles, vibrations in quantum fields, is temporary.

I exist right now, and I have importance in relation to other humans and the world, even though at some point, this combination will not exist anymore. But all the pieces of which I am constituted will still be in other places. The stuff of which I am made—particles, energy, mass, charge, spin—is immortal, but the thing that I refer to as I is gloriously mortal. 

Ilona Ruegg, Light In Wall, 1997, on-site installation, torch bulb and long-term battery integrated in closed wall.

IR I love your way of talking about eternity. In a way, immortality is still there, but in a different sense or organization. We believe too much in this density of the body, the touch of the body, and think that is reality. For me, the notion that we continue beyond our individuality is totally clear and even comforting. It will continue not with my brain, not with my ideas, but my ideas may leave traces.

When both of my parents died, my siblings and I had to decide what to do with their things. My father collected tin jars, some were in the living room and the garage was full of them. They were of value to my parents, they represented older times. So I decided to make an artwork—I melted the tin jars into a series of ingots, with a lid figure on top of each. All the metal, electrons, particles are in them, including the remaining symbols. It is like a new beginning. I called it Option, an option for something new.

JB That’s a nice metaphor for a promise of renewal. The particular configuration of this tin had use in the past, as a food can, and then it had collector’s value. And now, as an artwork, it has intentional value, and also cultural and historical meaning. It’s this kind of cycle.

IR Now it’s just a functional abstract form. What interests me is exactly what you describe as a transformation of different values and use through time. 

Ilona Ruegg, Option, 2012, cast ingots with different lid figures from melted tin mugs, dimensions variable.

JB One of the most profound things about studying the universe in detail, via physics and astrophysics, is that it compels us to understand the universe on spatial and temporal scales that are not at all intuitive to us as humans. Everything around us is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, but these things are so small that it’s nearly impossible to comprehend. For example, if a proton were the size of an ant, then the distance between a proton in your foot and the top of your head would be the same as the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The size of a proton is completely not intuitive to humans.

It’s similar for time scales. We consider one hundred years to be a long life for a human, or a few thou- sand years for human civilizations, but the universe as we know it has been around for 13.8 billion years and humanity has been around for a tiny, negligible fraction of that time. And in a few billion years, all record of humanity will be gone forever—except maybe for the Voyager satellites. In six billion years the Sun will probably expand just large enough to burn the Earth and turn it into a crispy nugget of coal that will sit and orbit a dark, collapsed black dwarf sun for 1026 years before eventually getting shredded into dust and absorbed by the dark sun. Humans are basically an afterthought—a blip.

IR It should make us humble that we have a relationship to other dimensions. Humble not in a moralistic way though. We are comforted in these dimensions. But we are not in the center of them.

I guess if in the very far future, the sun burns the world down to a biscuit, we will still be there as particles. Yes?

JB Oh, yes. Our particles will still exist.

IR So why do we cling so much to our individuality? We can make and develop things, and humanity has developed incredible things, but we are also just particles and will remain particles, like everything else.

JB Yes. It’s my hope that the knowledge will make us humble while not dismissing other humans as just collections of particles. I would like it to be a universalizing piece of information rather than dismissive or reductionist.

I often wonder why are we so attached to or obsessed with our own configuration of particles? Why are we in love with that? Why do I think that mine is better than someone else’s particle configuration? I mean, I understand that as a human being with a brain, I have an ego. But I also try to remind myself that this finite timespan for a human life is natural. Death and taxes, you know. (laughter)

IR I like to think of myself as this composed being. Particles are always encountered as fragments of a whole somewhere. I’m very interested in working with fragments because I can freely compose with them. 

Ilona Ruegg, Without Horizon/no trinity after after all these years, 2008, scratch marks on cardboard, 10.25 x 15.25 inches.

JB Going back to the notions of the unseen, the real, and the hidden. How do we define what is real when we as humans have a limited number of ways with which we can interact with the world? We only have five senses with which we can extract information from the world: that’s it. But there are things all around us that do not interact directly with those five senses. Experiments like the Large Hadron Collider are tools that humans build, as an extension of our bodies, so that we can investigate and understand the universe at scales that are literally impossible for humans to directly interact with. Again, I’ll never be able to interact with the Higgs boson particle directly but indirectly I can see, quote-unquote, “what it is” via the patterns of its decay with the outgoing particles. We’re extracting hidden information from the universe. But the process of extraction involves fundamentally re-orienting our perspective on the basis of reality.

For example, we keep saying we’re made of particles, like protons, neutrons, and electrons. But if I zoom in on an electron, what is it, really? We think of it as a little piece of something moving through space, right? But the more accurate way is to think of an electron not as a chunk of something moving through empty space but as a tiny excitation in a background field that exists everywhere in the universe—like an indentation in the field. Imagine you’re playing with your cat on the bed. You stretch the bedsheet tight and then put your finger underneath it and make a tiny tent or excitation in the sheet. Then you move your finger around like that and the cat chases this “thing.” The sheet is the fundamental object, which, for an electron, is a quantum field. And the electron is the little excitation.

The Higgs boson particle is like that, too; it’s an excitation in a field—the Higgs field—which is like an invisible jelly that permeates all of space all the time. But, unlike electrons, there are no Higgs bosons around you right now. We need special experiments to excite this Higgs field in just the right way, via our proton collisions, to make a little vortex or swirl in this Higgs field. And this vortex or swirl is the Higgs boson particle.

IR It’s much more about the chain of incidents, or what follows the incidents, what changes, than the particle itself. When you described the electron like a finger that sticks up under a sheet, an early work of Mike Kelley came to my mind. It is a large striped blanket, like a traditional Mexican or Peruvian blanket, and he had put some cone-like objects underneath that made the fabric stick out [Lumpenprole, 1991]. I love that so much. I believe much more in incidents or situations than in the prominent object. 

JB You can’t have the object without the broader context within which you’re defining it. 

IR I want to talk about another work of mine, called Property. It starts with an object—a safe I found in my studio building. Nobody wanted it because it was so heavy. And they couldn’t take it out of the building so they said, “You can have it.” I also thought it was too heavy, but then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My father was a banker and as a child I was proud to visit him at the bank, sometimes around day’s end when he had to close the safe. It was a very big safe with a wheel to lock it and I was fascinated by it. He never showed me what was inside. I think that was good because my imagination of values started there.

So when I came upon this safe in my studio building, I had to make a work out of it. I had a contact at a very generous road company who came with a heavy crane truck to take it out of the window directly onto the truck. The safe then went to the company’s metalworking department, where we could approach it as “burglars,” with locksmiths’ knowledge, tools, and assistance.

Because the keys were missing, I decided to open the safe by cutting six big corners away.

JB You sliced off the corners with a blow torch?

IR Yes, with the same tool burglars used to open a safe. We all had a lot of fun, but we did it in an organized way. I approached the safe as an architecture, where the inside and outside was of the same value—so it lost all the protective capacities to hide valuable things away. In a way, it was a social act to offer this safe to everybody: to give access to values or to allow thinking about property in a different way. Then, when we cut through, there was very fine sand coming out of it. Somebody told me that they’d put the sand in the interspaces between several layers of very hard steel because with a blow torch you lose oxygen and the torch will keep stopping. So a burglar would need an extended time to open the safe.

IR The interspaces were about 10 centimeters wide and filled with a lot of sand. So, what to do about that? I asked them, “Do we have containers to put it in?” And they brought these silver containers, twenty of them. The final artwork, Property, consists of the cut-up safe, plus the corners I had sliced of, which are presented as new free architectures in themselves, plus the twenty containers with the sand sealed in for potential future use. The sand was not just stone sand, it was brick sand.

Property basically freed the object, the safe, by shifting it into a new socioeconomic context where ownership is suspended. 

Ilona Ruegg, Property, 2020, steel safe sliced open at 6 corners and brick sand from safe walls in aluminum buckets.

JB This notion of calling ownership into question is, of course, very relevant to what we’ve been talking about—the reduction of everything to individual particles, right? It shows again how our different practices expose the hubristic tendencies that we have as individual humans, but also as societies. We currently have a dominant socioeconomic system that is based entirely upon private property and the fact that things can be demarcated as mine versus yours. In Western Europe and North America, we have cultivated a cultural suspicion of communally-owned things. Private property and ownership: we’re obsessed with these concepts, right? We’re either participating in them or we’re fighting against them. It’s this demarcation that has been imposed on us. But from a vantage point of particle physics, astrophysics, or from your artistic practice, the notion of ownership is immediately called into question. Because how can I own something? I’m just a collection of protons and electrons. I can’t own another collection of protons and electrons.

On a long-enough time scale, the universe will dismantle these configurations we currently identify as “things” around us, and the notions of ownership, property, and demarcation will be destroyed. In the process of deconstructing the safe, you’ve inverted the concept of ownership. A safe is a perfect example of how we’re obsessed with lines of demarcation: what’s inside is mine and no one else owns this stuff. Your work revealed the fallacy of this type of thinking. I also like the sand being in its own containers when before it was in service of ensuring the hermetic sanctity of this ownership.

IR I mean, a lot of thought was put into constructing a safe. And often it was the bank robbers themselves that were consulted on how to build it so that they can’t open it too fast. (laughter) With the awareness that we are just particles, it starts to be ridiculous to fight for the property gained. It’s not that I’m against property. I, myself, own things. But I think the question is, How do you use your capacity and what do you put in the world as a construction of value? What offering is in it?

JB Yes. The truth is that my lofty particle physics and astrophysics metaphors break down when we talk about struggling individual humans now, at this moment. These metaphors are cold comfort to someone who is being exploited. They don’t confront real inequities and biases. For example, I can’t say to a person who’s enslaved mining diamonds, “Oh, don’t worry, you’re being exploited by capitalism right now. But, you know, in a few billion years, we’ll all be equal.”

But I would hope that going through these processes of understanding the universe at a more fundamental level might help put our attitudes in perspective. These prevalent attitudes toward our fellow human beings are, to my mind, largely constructed by cultural forces, by the dominant socioeconomic systems that have trained and conditioned us all to think that there’s a line between me and the outside world and this makes me an individual. One of my goals is to remind people that there are other ways of thinking about the world and human societies. There are ways of organizing ourselves that are not based upon this mindset. 

Ilona Ruegg’s works are often realized in connection with workflows and production processes or with existing architectural situations. She sees them as expandable sculptural forms, as momentary deposits in the flow of time that carry the potential for change. Sometimes only temporarily in the course of events. In doing so, Ruegg tries to capture the existing temporal layers physically and in material terms and to interrogate them for their societal significance. Her intention is to rearrange or confuse them in order to expand configurations of space and time. Contradictory interrelationships emerge into which people can enter and approach an unfamiliar experience. She thinks that there is a need for new tools of awareness and action in a future environment that we still have to grow into.

James Beacham does experimental high energy particle physics. He works on an experiment at the LHC, ATLAS, and previously worked on an experiment at Jefferson Lab, APEX. Dr. Beacham also trained as a filmmaker before then training as a physicist, and makes films still. He holds a completely separate prior bachelor’s degree in Film Studies from the University of Utah.

The art, activity, dance, and protest of skating.

The artist talks about subcultures, collecting, and collaboration.

Our Winter 2022 issue features interviews with Marina Adams, James Beacham, Renée Green, James Hannaham, Ilona Ruegg, Bassem Saad, Solmaz Sharif, Henry Threadgill, and Martha Tuttle; an essay by Tina M. Campt; fiction by Christine Vines, Kim Fu, Caio Fernando Abreu, and Sebastian Castillo; poetry by Amit Majmudar and Xan Phillips; a portfolio by Seher Shah; a comic by Warren Craghead III; Sebastián Silva’s newly hand-annotated interview from 2011; and more.

If the soul and the ego were objects we could look at, the soul would be a translucent heart beating.

BOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. BOMB’s founders—New York City artists and writers—decided to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves. Today, BOMB is a nonprofit, multi-platform publishing house that creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature. BOMB includes a quarterly print magazine, a daily online publication, and a digital archive of its previously published content from 1981 onward.

Annually, BOMB serves 1.5 million online readers––44% of whom are under 30 years of age––through its free and searchable archive and BOMB Daily, a virtual hub where a diverse cohort of artists and writers explore the creative process within a community of their peers and mentors. BOMB's Oral History Project is dedicated to collecting, documenting, and preserving the stories of distinguished visual artists of the African Diaspora.

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