Art in America, February 2007

Todd Siler at Ronald Feldman

Todd Siler, both a scientist and an artist, turned the Feldman gallery into the inside of his head, or at least a lab log of sorts, for the run of his recent show there. The result had the slightly feverish, rather disheveled air of an enthusiastically installed school science fair, and your initial response to “Fractal Reactor: Re-creating the Sun” might have depended on how you feel about such presentations. One wall was given over to a wide, elongated band of scroll-like paper – Alternative Geometry for Plasma Fusion (1999-2006) – covered with text explaining the theory and mechanics behind Siler’s fractal reactor. This document was punctuated with illustrations, diagrams and some modestly sized three-dimensional sections of his dream machine. The adjacent wall, covered in great sheets of black paper, resembled a blackboard scribbled over with silvery script. It was accompanied by drawings, such as a sphere pocked with numbered radiant circles representing oscillating fractal magnets.

Another wall held four mixed medium and collaged drawings depicting more fractal phenomena and annotated with handwritten hortatory quotes from Thomas Edison (“There is a better way. Find it.”) and Jacob Bronowski (The whole of science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.”) The titles included portmanteau words of the artist’s invention, such as “metaphorm” and “simplexity.”

There was a small spherical model of the reactor (2000) that looked like a soccer ball cut so that the interior was revealed, and another more recent model that dealt with the device’s nanotechnology. Siler has said that his fractal reactor can be made at any scale, from smaller than a pinpoint to mega-sized structures.

In another room, there was a video with nifty effects that explained once again – for the text-challenged – the science behind this effort. Here also, the walls were hung with many drawings. A few sculptural forms were suspended from the ceiling, including a wire tangle, Anatomy of a Hot Plasma (200 million degrees Kelvin), 2006, that seemed a cousin to Alan Saret’s ethereal sculptures from the 1970s.

Essentially, Siler shows us how to begin to think about constructing a fractal reactor based on a thermonuclear fusion system, which he claims is more effective than fission because it is non-Euclidean and closely replicates the actual physics and geometry of a star. His system is efficient, clean and quite feasible, so it is much more economical than those it would replace. (Siler thinks he can build a functioning prototype for around $10 million, which is much less that the cost of a nuclear reactor.” The unit is also self-sustaining once it reaches its break-even point, and it won’t go into meltdown, so it is completely safe. This star system – unlike some others – does seem to be a better way. Certainly the premise is appealing, and so is the art, in a Buckminster Fuller manner. But like all marriages, this one of art and science has its ups and downs. Maybe, though, Siler should run for president with Al (An Inconvenient Truth) Gore. I’d vote for them.

LILY WEI