Subscribe options

Select your newsletters:

Please enter your email address:

@

Your email address will only be used for the purpose of sending you the ITER Organization publication(s) that you have requested. ITER Organization will not transfer your email address or other personal data to any other party or use it for commercial purposes.

If you change your mind, you can easily unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe option at the bottom of an email you've received from ITER Organization.

For more information, see our Privacy policy.

News & Media

Latest ITER Newsline

  • Data archiving | Operating in quasi real time

    To accommodate the first real-time system integrated with the ITER control system, new components of the data archiving system have been deployed. Data archivi [...]

    Read more

  • Repairs | Setting the stage for a critical task

    Like in a game of musical chairs—albeit in slow motion and at a massive scale—components in the Assembly Hall are being transferred from one location to another [...]

    Read more

  • Image of the week | There is life on Planet ITER

    Dated April 2023, this new image of the ITER "planet" places the construction site squarely in the middle. One kilometre long, 400 metres wide, the IT [...]

    Read more

  • Deputy Director-General | Luo Delong, Corporate

    Many years later, when the Ministry of Science and Technology assigned him to the ITER Project, Luo Delong was to remember the day when, as a young boy, he read [...]

    Read more

  • Visit | Japanese MEXT Minister tours the installation

    In Japan, a MEXT Minister has a lot on his or her plate: the extensive Ministry is a huge administrative machine whose purview includes education, culture, [...]

    Read more

Of Interest

See archived entries

ITER NEWSLINE -

Contemporary art

Venet's "arcs" are as heavy as ITER coils

A "conceptual artist" among the most prominent on the art scene today, Bernar Venet is not impressed by massive towering steel structures like those in the ITER Assembly Hall. Creating massive towering steel structures are his daily routine. Two years ago, in Belgium, the French-born artist who spent most of his career in the United States, unveiled one of his most spectacular works: a 200-tonne, 60-metre-tall "Arc Majeur" that looks like a giant curved upholstery needle piercing the E411 motorway.

Conceptual artist Bernar Venet and his wife Diane toured the ITER construction site on Monday. Familiar with massive towering steel structures (his ''Arc Majeur'' sculpture is the largest work of art in Europe) the artist was deeply impressed by the intelligence and creativity that have made ITER possible. (Click to view larger version...)
Conceptual artist Bernar Venet and his wife Diane toured the ITER construction site on Monday. Familiar with massive towering steel structures (his ''Arc Majeur'' sculpture is the largest work of art in Europe) the artist was deeply impressed by the intelligence and creativity that have made ITER possible.
Born in Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban, only 50 kilometres north of ITER, Venet visited the ITER site for the first time on Monday 29 November accompanied by his wife Diane—an art collector specialized in "artists' jewelry."

What impressed Venet most was not the size of the components being readied for installation in the Tokamak pit, or the 24-metre-in-diameter poloidal field coils currently in fabrication on the ITER site ... but rather the intelligence and creativity that make ITER possible. "Who are the people who designed such a machine? How did they manage to think about all the details?"

At an early stage of his career, Venet explored the artistic potential of equations, graphs, technical drawings, and traces of fundamental particles revealed in bubble chambers. At ITER, he might have found in plasma a source of inspiration for future works.

return to the latest published articles