Art Daybook: The messy business of ingenuity

The piece: "Measuring, Helmholtz Zentrum, Berlin"

The artist: Thomas Struth

Where: In "Nature & Politics," Struth's show at Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, through May 29

Why: Thomas Struth doesn't care if you know what, exactly, is happening in the complex scientific environments he photographs, which he equates to sculpture. But you can't help wondering.

Especially with the chaotic-looking situation of "Measuring," an image with a deliberately vague title that looks like the laboratory of a mad scientist. Struth shot this image in 2012 at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, a research center whose facilities include a "storage ring" commonly known as Bessy II. According to the center's website, Bessy II is "the ultimate microscope for space and time,"  with more than 50 beam lines for X-ray microscopy, X-ray polarimetry, spectromicroscopy, high-resolution photon and electron spectroscopy, nanotechnology and pump-probe spectroscopy with temporal resolution ranging from 50ps down to 100fs. It is, the site says, "a unique slicing facility." I think what we're seeing is a "linear accelerator" apparatus, but I'm not sure.

What fascinates Struth is the irony of insanely complicated experimental operations that humans have built in the service of trying to understand basic laws of nature – or outwit them.

Struth said he knows little or nothing about plasma physics, space travel, tumor operations or deep sea oil drilling, but he considers himself "a big antenna trying to receive something" from the locations that capture his imagination. "What's the emotional and intellectual atmosphere I can read from this?" he said. "I use the camera and myself as a kind of Geiger counter: I just stand in front of it and see what is the quality that is emitted, that is pulsating there? I'm reading entanglement, passion, complexity – the kind of necessary tunnel vision that scientists have to have. ... Research people who work in experimental fields are akin to artists ... they have to be open, courageous and kind of friendly with the idea of failure."

When you think high-tech, a place like the one depicted in "Measuring" might not come to mind. But ingenuity is messy inside the brain, and out.

Bookmark Gray Matters. It looks like the laboratory of a mad scientist.