Anticoincidence Guides, 2019.
Ambrotypes, metal stands, glass plates, foam.

CERN archive photographs depicting plexiglass scintillator counters, used to guide light through a particle accelerator, printed on glass by means of ambrotype technique. Installation @ Harbinger exhibition, Botanical Garden Ghent University.

In the CERN particle accelerators, anticoincidence guides are plexiglass constructions used to guide a triggered flash of light as it travels through the trajectory circuit. The work plays with the dialectics between old and new light techniques and materials as well as with different measures of light time (the ultrafast event in particle physics vs the cumbersome slowness of historical photographic processes). Moreover, as these plexiglass constructions are used in particle physics to rule out any unforeseen coincidences and to facilitate straightforward scientific results, here they are the outcome of a trial-and-error printing technique (collodion-ambrotype) with a very phantasmagoric appearance.