Arts at CERN

Everything Happens Once addresses Neudecker’s ongoing interest in the intersections of extremes in environment and scale

The experiment CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets), led by physicist Jasper Kirkby, investigates and tests how cosmic rays affect the climate by re-creating specific atmospheres under controlled conditions. This, like many of the experiments at CERN, embodies unperceivable extremes of scale. Everything you physically see is too large, and what is analysed is invisible or too small behind steel, tin foil, and tape.

During her several visits as a guest artist at CERN, Neudecker has taken extensive video tracking shots around the CLOUD experiment to develop Everything Happens Once, 2020. The work consists of a set of two self-propelling programmed computer monitors independently running on wall-mounted 7-metre long tracks, each with a charging dock on the same end. Once charged, each monitor moves horizontally up and down of its own accord, displaying 14 tracking shots programmed in random sequence and moving at the speed it was filmed, creating the illusion of ‘virtual windows’ into the reality of the CLOUD experiment.

In reference to the elusive nature of time and space, the same tracking shot will never appear at the same point on the track more than once, always in a different place, possibly moving in a different direction and in a different combination with the other monitor’s footage. It can never be perceived in the same way and also can never be repeated. Interpretation remains subjective, informed by a collision of shifting circumstances that might be psychological, physical, and socio-political. The use of camera tracking shots tests our perceptions, engaging our imagination and both enabling and limiting our understanding; as what we see is both essential and irrelevant, the mundane materiality of scientific research is masking groundbreaking discoveries into the origins of existence.