- Venue
- CERN Science Gateway, Geneva, Switzerland
Leading figures in literature, philosophy, science, art, and music will come together for conversations, performances, and films to explore the ‘quantum moment’ and its profound influence on contemporary culture
The CERN Art and Science Summit highlights the achievement of CERN’s forward-thinking approach to arts and creativity. Following the inaugural Summit in 2024, the second edition will bring together a selected group of guests, including artists who participated in Arts at CERN’s programmes.
This year’s theme, Uncertainty, aligns with UNESCO’s declaration of 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. This initiative celebrates the impacts of quantum science, marking a century since a group of scientists laid the foundations of quantum physics in Europe.
Quantum physics describes nature in all its extraordinary complexity, and artists have assumed an important role in this process. Over recent decades, it has gained a significant impact on contemporary culture. It’s well known that it has affected the tropes of art, philosophy, film and literature. This cultural impact reflects society’s growing interest in fundamental research and physics.
Within this thematic framework, guest speakers and attendees will be invited to explore the world of physics, the ‘quantum moment’, and its vast influence on culture. The CERN Art and Science Summit is curated annually by the Arts at CERN team. As a renowned platform for the intersection of arts and sciences, Arts at CERN fosters engagement and discussion between artists and scientists.
In English with simultaneous interpretation into French.
5 February | Science Gateway Auditorium A
Free admission, registration required
18:00 Welcome and introduction
Frédérick Bordry, former CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology and Chair of the CERN Cultural Advisory Board; Mónica Bello, curator and head of Arts at CERN
18:10 On the Uncertainty of Quantum
Luis Álvarez Gaumé, theoretical physicist and director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook, New York
One of the most famous slogans of the French unrest in May 1968 can be phrased as: ‘Soyez raisonnable, demandez l’impossible.’
Profound, explicitly surrealist, it can be used at any moment. A hundred years ago, the basis for a fundamental description of reality at the atomic level was laid. They opened the gate to the quantum world that has transformed our understanding of the universe, and its applications have changed our lives in uncountable ways.
It is often said that ‘nobody understands quantum mechanics’. In a short presentation, we will honour the above slogan by showing a short silent film that will provide a fairly accurate glimpse of what quantum mechanics is all about, some of the new conceptual tenets required to describe physical reality at a fundamental level, and how uncertainty, entanglement, and nonlocality become an intrinsic part of of the new picture. There are passionate discussions about the ‘interpretation of quantum mechanics,’ involving physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, maybe even theologians, but one thing seems clear: the world is fundamentally quantum, and classical behaviour almost always emerges when going from the micro to the macro world. By being unreasonable, we could achieve the possible.
Honor Harger, executive director of ArtScience Museum
One of the greatest pioneers of quantum mechanics, Richard Feynman, once remarked: ‘What is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations — to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all.’
In this short talk, Honor Harger explores how art acts as a vivid form of scientific imagination, helping reveal the enigmatic realities of the quantum world. From wave-particle duality to the Higgs mechanism, the laws of nature challenge us to reconcile simplicity with complexity, and beauty with uncertainty. This talk will refer to exhibitions at ArtScience Museum, such as Collider, created in collaboration with CERN, which immersed visitors in the machinery of the universe, and All Possible Paths: Richard Feynman’s Curious Life, which celebrated the interplay of observation and creativity that defines quantum mechanics. By examining how art translates the hidden architectures of reality into tangible, human-scale experiences, the talk will show how creativity complements experimentation, echoing Feynman’s belief in the inseparable partnership between intuition and empirical evidence.
Feynman believed imagination was vital to uncovering the ‘wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns’ of reality. Could art, as a form of imagination, help us see not just the quantum world, but our place within it, more clearly?
19:00 Holly Corfield Carr, poet | The Spoem
Listening for a svoice in the sdark, Holly Corfield Carr embarks on a strange and supersymmetrical descent into language and lyrical thinking in search of what we might be unmaking when we are making things. As she begins to dig herself a hole, she will share new work which imagines correspondences between the known and the unknown spaces of the worlds and words we live in.
19:10 Unknowability!
Jalal Toufic, artist thinker; Shuddhabrata Sengupta, artist and curator with the Raqs Media Collective
19:50 Rasheedah Phillips, artist, writer, and co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism | Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Step into the quantum unknown with Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism as they present an electrifying excerpt from their forthcoming book, Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time (AK Press). Reflecting on their residency with Arts at CERN, Phillips weaves personal experience with deep explorations of quantum uncertainty and its resonance with Black temporalities. Through an Afrodiasporic lens, they uncover how concepts like CPT symmetry and violations disrupt linear notions of time, inviting us to reimagine the mutable interplay of past, present, and future.
20:00 Performance by 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.
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.).
5 and 6 February | 9:00 – 17:00 | Science Gateway Auditorium BC (Access via Science Gateway visitors reception)
Free access, no registration required.
The Summit features films by artists who have worked closely with the CERN scientific community, including Arts at CERN commissions and works by former residents. All films are screened at the Laboratory for the first time. Embracing uncertainty as a fundamental aspect of reality and knowledge, the programme explores how film serves as portals to articulate worlds, transforming the cinematic screen as a gateway to these realms.
The programme premieres HUM (2025, 09’08”) by Tania Candiani, the latest Arts at CERN’s art commission with the generous support of the The Didier and Martine Primat Foundation. This video essay explores the universal language of the trumpet shape—a form resonating through nature, culture, and the cosmos. Blending visual and auditory layers, it traces connections from sinkholes and black holes to ancient instruments and conceptual thought, from alpine alphorns to experiments at CERN. HUM examines how this geometry amplifies the connections between the human, the natural, and the infinite, inviting viewers to uncover the unseen threads interweaving our world.
Artists examine the theoretical, material, and personal dimensions of science-making at CERN and beyond. They engage with the creative inquiries, the experimental labour, and the metaphysical implications of discovery. Through ethnographic observations, poetic narratives, and speculative dialogues, the films question how science shapes our understanding of the world.
In Mass (2021) by June Balthazar and Pierre Pauze, 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.
The View from Nowhere (2018) by Semiconductor 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.
In We Aren’t Able to Prove That Just Yet… (2018), 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.
Other works draw inspiration from quantum phenomena such as entanglement, non-linear time, and indeterminacy. These principles serve as a foundation for navigating multiple worldviews, challenging dominant paradigms of knowledge and their claims to universality. By engaging with speculative fiction and ancestral wisdoms, they open spaces for imagining pluralistic frameworks of coexistence.
In Black Quantum Futurism’s Write No History (2021, 15’34”), 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.
Preludio Cuántico (Quantum Prelude) (2022, 29’51”) by Tania Candiani is a sound action for voices and instruments that intertwine different paradigms of understanding life, from ancestral Indigenous cosmogonies to quantum physics. It is situated at MUAC’s Espacio Escultórico (Sculptural Space) in Mexico City. The circular megalithic monument, circumscribed by 64 triangular prisms, mirrors the presence of 64 musicians performing in the space, orchestrating their sounds as a living score. It draws a parallel between the Sculptural Space and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, creating a striking visual narrative with archival images of early particle detectors from CERN.
Finally, the programme delves into the boundaries of perception, orientation, and reality, presenting films that navigate disorienting landscapes where natural or virtual phenomena disrupt the senses.
In Rosa Menkman’s Whiteout (2021, 16’53”), 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.
The point of departure of Somnium (2011, 19’15”) by Rosa Barba is a short story by astronomer Johannes Kepler. Although framed as a dream, this tale of a lunar voyage was devised to validate his radical 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. Recorded in 16mm film on a site planned as a future harbour, 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.
6 February at CERN
Please note this event is by invitation only.
The second day of the CERN Art and Science Summit creates a space for meaningful dialogue among professionals and offers insight into the exchanges between artists and the CERN scientific community. The programme delves into the processes, dialogues, and outcomes of Arts at CERN, featuring artists in residence, recent art commissions, and an upcoming publication. Some guests will also have the opportunity to present their work in response to the Summit’s theme, Uncertainty.
09:30 Doors open
10:00 Welcome and introduction by Mónica Bello
10:05 Processes
Processes are where untested ideas and concepts are explored, revealing the particular interplay between science and culture. These discussions bring together artists who have worked at CERN across different periods to exchange their perspectives and delve into the potential of process-driven exploration.
– Rehearsing Duality, Elisa Storelli and Rohini Devasher.
– In conversation, Robin Meier and Gianni Motti.
– Rasheedah Phillips presents their new book Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time (AK Press).
11:05 Visit to the Exploring the Unknown exhibition with Chloé Delarue
11:45 Dialogues
Dialogues are key for finding common ground and shaping shared ideas. To foster this exchange, various guests will present their projects, ideas, and open opportunities within the thematic framework of the CERN Art and Science Summit.
– Presentations by Ligia Bouton, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Declan Colquitt, Robert Kieffer, Florencia Levy, George Mahashe, Hannah Redler-Hawes, Samoa Remy, and Luis Enrique Zela-Koort.
* Standing lunch will be served during the Dialogues.
13:15 Outcomes
Outcomes solidify ideas through thoughtful processes and dialogue. Arts at CERN has grown into a community system, rooted in individual experiences and contributions. These outcomes embody the collective journey, connecting personal perspectives with shared visions.
– Tania Candiani, in conversation about the film premiere of HUM
– Presentation In the Spaces Between, a publication by Arts at CERN (DPR-Barcelona).
14:00 Coffee break.
14:45 Visit to CERN’s different experimental facilities
![Patricia Domínguez, Tres lunas más abajo [Three Moons Below], 2024](https://arts.cern/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/20.2024-Tres-Lunas-Mas-abajo-696x1024.jpg)