Jules Grucker, Chadi Abo, Céline Boisserie-Lacroix

Art+Science Collaborations: Conversation 2

A Dialogue between Jules Grucker (Physicist, Kastler Brossel Laboratory) & Chadi Abo (Producer, Director, Special Effects Specialist, Hecat Studio). Interview conducted by Céline Boisserie-Lacroix.

Jules: I am a physicist at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory, a quantum physics lab-oratory mainly interested in cold atoms and quantum optics. Personally, I work on liquid helium, which presents important properties due to quantum physics. At the moment, I am conducting experiments to measure the speed of sound in this fluid to better understand it.

Chadi: I am a producer and director. I have also specialized in special effects after initially training in architecture. I founded my production studio, Hecat Studio, nearly fifteen years ago, and I have had the opportunity to work for renowned directors. When I write my own films, I seek to imagine worlds inspired by science fiction, to recreate a parallel reality.

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Jules: A dialogue I would like to have with an artist could be the following. I would describe to them my probably idealized and caricatured vision of what I think an artist is, then I would ask them what their vision of a scientist is. This should lead to quite different points of view.

To start, I would say that what we have in common, artists and scientists, is a way of speaking to others. My idealized vision of an artist is someone who manages to share their emotions with others, ensuring that their work reflects well what they want to convey.

Chadi: I often have reservations about considering myself an artist insofar as I use a lot of science and technology to express my art. If I became interested in draw-ing when I was a child, it was as an escape from a rather hard and monotonous life—I was born and raised in Syria. I was not specifically looking for emotion but rather a logical dimension, of conformity, as I was very technical. I drew cars, planes, spaceships, and I was quickly attracted to the world of science fiction. Also, if for Jules it is important to seek emotion, it is something that I am only now beginning to understand.

The questions around reality, realism, and strangeness disturb me. I often find myself in a position where I am an emulator of reality: I do everything to sim-ulate reality, otherwise the images I create evoke the famous “uncanny valley”1, that place in the brain that tells us what we see is disturbing, not real. This is an important point for me, because today, we can sympathize much more easily with a smiley (just two dots and a mouth) than with a creature or a human being (well) made but which remains synthetic.

Jules: For me, the word reality seems complicated because it can have several meanings depending on the disciplines. In my field, what I will call reality is the result of an experiment, whether it materializes in the form of an image, an