Arts at CERN

Following their residency at CERN, Bucknell reflects on Small Void, a video game shaped by conversations with theoretical physicists about cosmic paradoxes and collaborations with engineers exploring nanoscale living worlds

Alice Bucknell is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and educator. In their practice, Bucknell uses video games as an affective medium to explore the limits of human knowledge systems. As the winner of Collide Copenhagen in 2024, they completed a residency split between CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary to develop Small Void.

This cooperative video game invites players to navigate a state of extreme disorientation, where the micro, such as lichens and moss, intersects with the macro through key phenomena in theoretical physics, including black hole memory, the information paradox, and cosmological natural selection. Players embark on a multisensory, collaborative journey to explore the spaces between worlds, realities, and knowledge systems.

In this video interview, Bucknell reflects on how their residency at CERN shaped Small Void, delving into conversations with theoretical physicists about black hole phenomena and collaborating with materials engineers to explore nanoscale living worlds. They discuss the poetic potential of gaming to envision the future and share insights into the intricacies of the installation, set to premiere at Copenhagen Contemporary in 2025.

My time at CERN was spent getting as close to the ground as possible and speculating on colliding black holes galaxies away, simultaneously. I spent my mornings scraping lichen from salt-stained concrete walls on campus. With the generous assistance of engineers Stefano Sgobba and Katie Buchanan from the Mechanical and Materials Engineering (MME) Group and engineers Romain Heisserer and Michal Celuch from Metrology, I learned to see these Earthbound aliens at dizzying nanoscale and x-rayed scales and sensibilities. Here, mould became mountains, a caterpillar a continent, and soil layers a universe unto itself.

In the afternoons, I met with theoretical physicists—specialists in black hole behaviours, quantum entanglement, gravitational waves and wormhole-enabled multidimensional diving (special shout out to Mauro Pieroni, Michael Doser, Andreas Helset, Alexander Zhiboedov, and Tim Cohen). Together, we pondered the information paradox of black holes, what spooky quantum happenings occur when a particle enters a black hole but its antiparticle gets shot back into space, and cosmological evolutionary theory: or whether collapsing black holes are the foundation for ever-complexifying universes.

Finally, at night-time, I hung out in the studio: sketching level designs and messing around with video game mechanics that could somehow unite these research strains. During this time, one thing became increasingly clear: the micro worlds of the lichen and the macro worlds of the cosmos are kind of the same thing.

My time at CERN offered a unique opportunity to workshop black hole-inspired game mechanics with seasoned physicists and explore the psychedelic underbelly of imaging the worlds within worlds of life itself—these shockingly detailed scans and trippy textures becoming assets in the game world, too. I’m so excited to be working with my collaborators—Jonathan Coryn, Magda Drozd, and Vincent Moulinet—to bring this emotive and exploratory video game to life.

Collide Copenhagen is the three-year collaboration framework between CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary, as part of Arts at CERN’s residency programme. It supports artistic research into art, science and technology, with residencies held annually from 2023 to 2025.