Arts at CERN

18:00 Welcome and introduction
Charlotte Warakaulle, director for International Relations, CERN; Mónica Bello, curator and head of Arts at CERN

18:15 Keynotes and conversation
Honor Harger, director of ArtScience Museum in Singapore; Luis Álvarez Gaumé, theoretical physicist and director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook

18:50 Interval
Holly Corfield Carr, poet

19:05 Keynotes and conversation
Jalal Toufic, thinker; Shuddhabrata Sengupta, artist and curator with the Raqs Media Collective

19:40 Interval
Rasheedah Phillips, artist, writer, and co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism

20:00 Performance
Maria Arnal, artist and singer

As the culmination of an artistic research process on the creation of synthetic voices and datasets, Maria Arnal presents a performance of inedit choral compositions alongside her various vocal models. Focused on the new vocal narratives enabled by AI tools, this concert creates a space at the intersection of synthetic polyphony, dataset creation, digital lutherie, and the expressive power of her physical voice.

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé is a Spanish theoretical physicist. Since 2016, Álvarez-Gaumé is the director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook. Dr. Álvarez-Gaumé received his PhD from Stony Brook in 1981. After having faculty positions at Harvard and Boston University, Luis became a senior staff member of the Theory Group at CERN in 1988. He was long-time Department Head of the Theory Group.

Maria Arnal is a Barcelona-based artist, singer, composer, and one of Spain’s most innovative and prominent contemporary music voices. Known for blending avant-garde pop, electronics, and traditional polyphonic music, she has performed at major festivals like Sónar and TED Talks in Vancouver. Her projects include “AIR” for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale and “SIRENA” for Hipermirador Torre Glòries 2022. In recent years, she has created AI-powered digital instruments inspired by her voice, experimenting with synthetic voice models such as timbre transfer and text-tosing as an artist-in-residence at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. This work earned her an honorary mention at Ars Electronica 2024’s S+T+ARTS Prize for Maria CHOIR, a sound installation exploring chorality and database sovereignty. These tools now shape her new repertoire, set to debut at Sónar 2025.

Mónica Bello is an art historian and curator with a deep understanding of the intersection of art and science. Since 2015, she has been a curator and head of Arts at CERN. In this pivotal role, she oversees the Laboratory’s diverse art initiatives, directing the conception and implementation of various artistic programs, including art residencies, commissions, and exhibitions. In her capacity, she develops international partnerships with cultural and scientific institutions, promoting a dynamic and interdisciplinary approach to art and science.

Holly Corfield Carr is a poet based in Bristol, UK. Her writing explores the spaces and languages of holeyness, from caves to the pigment pit of a fly’s eye. Previous work has won the Frieze Writer’s Prize and the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award and she has made poems, books and performances for the BBC, the Hayward Gallery and the National Trust. She is a Lecturer in Poetry at the University of East Anglia.

Honor Harger is a curator from New Zealand with a keen interest in the cultural impact of scientific ideas. Since 2014, she has been the Director of ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore and is now also Vice President of Attractions at Marina Bay Sands. The museum has hosted exhibitions by renowned artists like Leonardo da Vinci, M.C. Escher, and contemporary artists such as Theo Jansen and Olafur Eliasson. It also explores scientific themes like particle physics and quantum mechanics. Previously, Honor directed Lighthouse in Brighton, UK, and curated events at Tate Modern. She co-founded the sound art collective r a d i o q u a l i a, known for the Radio Astronomy project. Honor has spoken at conferences like TED, Lift and SciFoo and lectured at institutions such as the European Space Agency and MIT.

Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, parent, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural producer who uses web-based projects, zines, short films, archival practices, experimental non-fiction, speculative fiction, printmaking, performance, social practice, installation and creative research to explore the construct of time, temporalities, and community futurisms through a Black futurist cultural lens and experience. Phillips is the founder of The AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism, co-creator of the award-winning Community Futures Lab, and creator of the Black Women Temporal Portal and Black Time Belt projects. Recognized as a national expert in housing policy, Phillips is a 2016 graduate of the Shriver Center Racial Justice Institute, a 2018 Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity, and a 2021 PolicyLink Ambassador for Health Equity. As part of BQF and as a solo artist, Phillips has been awarded an Arts at CERN Collide Artists Residency, Vera List Center Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, and United States Artist, among others.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist and curator with the Raqs Media Collective, based in Delhi, India. Sengupta co-founded Raqs with Monica Narula and Jeebesh Bagchi in 1992. The hybrid practice of Raqs occupies a ground that is expressively poetic while being rigorously analytical. Raqs follows its self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods (sound, image, video, text, object, gesture), even while employing speculative procedures. The work articulates an intimately lived relationship with myths and histories of diverse provenances, opening them out through a conversational practice that embodies a deep ambivalence towards monochrony, and a consistent critique of the operations of power  and property. Raqs enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs.

Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of over ten books (Postscripts [Moderna Museet; Roma Publications, 2020], What Was I Thinking? [e-flux journal-Sternberg Press, 2017] …), which are available for download at his website: www.jalaltoufic.com. He has made over twenty films and videos, which include essay films and conceptual films; short films, feature-length films, and “inhumanely” long films (72 hours, 50 hours); films that he shot and films in which all the images are from works by other filmmakers (Hitchcock, Sokurov, Bergman, etc.).

June Balthazard and Pierre Pauze | Mass (2021) – 17 minutes

CERN physicist Chiara Mariotti and Nobel laureate Michel Mayor journey through CERN’s experiments and primordial caves within a speculative world amidst ecological collapse. As they await a new dawn, the scientists discuss contrasting understandings of the void. Once central to creation myths, the void is now one of science’s key unresolved questions, as both particle physics and astrophysics challenge classical notions of emptiness in their search for a unified explanation.

Tania Candiani | New film commission (2025)

The experimental film explores the profound interconnectedness of trumpet-shaped forms across nature, physics, and cosmic phenomena. Inspired by the alphorn, the project examines the physics of sound pipes, the sustained resonance of sound waves, and the organic elegance of tubular structures like pitcher plants and tubular fossils. It juxtaposes these natural forms with celestial and geological phenomena—gravity wells, blue holes, sinkholes, and black holes, including their enigmatic event horizons—highlighting the recurring trumpet-like geometries that bridge the microscopic and the cosmic. Drawing parallels with the monumental tubes and resonance chambers at CERN, the film contemplates the universality of these shapes, unravelling their roles in sustaining energy, guiding waves, and opening gateways to the unknown. Through this intricate tapestry of sound, image, and motion, the work immerses viewers in a dialogue between the earthly and the infinite, where the alphorn’s echo becomes a metaphor for the resonances that bind all things.

Rosa Barba | Somnium (2011) – 19 minutes

Somnium’s point of departure is a short story by German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Although framed as a dream, this tale of a lunar voyage was devised to validate the radically seditious thesis of a heliocentric universe. Borrowing Kepler’s title in tribute, Barba has drawn upon both his tale and, equally importantly, his remarkable achievement in establishing a new ontology of vision. The recordings for the 16mm film Somnium were made in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) on a site planned as a future harbour, which will become operational in 2030. The landscape introduced therein is itself surreal, strange and uninhabited, capturing the science-fiction tone of Kepler’s story. The boundaries between reality and fiction resolve into the poetic language of the film’s narrative, accompanied by the music of Jan St. Werner.

Semiconductor | The View from Nowhere (2018) – 13 minutes

The View from Nowhere offers an ethnographic observation of CERN’s laboratory culture. The film brings together reflections by theoretical physicists Luis Álvarez Gaumé and John Ellis with filmed footage from high-tech workshops. It reveals the ‘trading zones’ where the creative process of modelling the universe converges with the labour and materiality of experimental processes. Through its exploration, the film highlights the collaborative frameworks humans have created to understand the nature of matter.

Patricia Domínguez | Tres Lunas Más Abajo (Three Moons Below) (2023–2024) – 53 minutes

Three Moons Below follows the journey of the protagonist and her robotic bird companion on their search to reconnect with their ‘entangled particle’. CERN’s physics experiments, the astronomical observatories in the Atacama Desert converge, and ancient petroglyphs serve as portals that transport them through otherwordly realities, as they consult with mystical beings and acquire the abilities of celestial antennas and particle detectors. The result is a universe intricately knotted in relationships that reconsider our notions of interconnectedness.

Yu-Chen Wang | We aren’t able to prove that just yet, but we know it’s out there (2018) – 10 minutes

Yu-Chen Wang focuses on CERN’s Bubble Chamber experiments of the 1960s. Drawing from photographic archives and interviews, the film weaves the visual abstraction of the tracks of short-lived subatomic particles with the intense labour of individuals interpreting these traces.

Rosa Menkman | Whiteout (2021) – 12 minutes

In Rosa Menkman’s Whiteout, the viewer is plunged into the disorienting experience of a snowstorm on a mountainous hike. As the protagonist loses her physical sensations and sense of space, she navigates a world devoid of conventional reference points. Here, a dimensionless void becomes an arena for reimagining space, perception, and consciousness. The absence of a clear horizon reveals layered realities, where movement carves out new axes of orientation and unfolds alternative landscapes in the wanderer’s mind.

Black Quantum Futurism | Write No History (2021)  – 14 minutes

In Write No History, The Temporal Disruptors, an ancient Secret Society of Black scientists, healers, and writers spread out across time in the relative past, present, future at one of their meeting lodges, the Hatfield House in Philadelphia. Through found and archival footage, the protagonists bury and unearth rituals to transport ‘quantum time capsules’, which contain tools, maps, clocks and codes that serve as technologies to recover erased histories and reclaim temporal landscapes.