Arts at CERN

Spaghetti Blockchain combines seemingly incompatible worlds: insights into CERN experiments, female Tuvan throat singers, and a potato farm in Main

This work is informed by Rottenberg’s interest in new materialisms, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry characterized by a turn away from the dualisms persistent in cultural theory and a reconsideration of the material relationships between human and nonhuman entities.

In the film, the artist mash-ups images of the filming from her time as a Guest Artist at CERN, mainly from the ATLAS experiment, CERN Data Centre, Antimatter Factory, and ISOLDE experiment. She combines this footage filmed in the laboratory with colourful ASMR-style scenarios, creating imagery that is simultaneously pleasurable and troubling.

Spaghetti Blockchain explores absurdist satire while acutely creating allegories for contemporary life: an exploration of labour, technology, distance, and matter about the seemingly immaterial. Through these film locations, Rottenberg experiments with humans’ ideas as composed of and as manipulators of matter, revealing the interconnectedness between the mechanical and the corporeal.