Past residency programmes
Guest Artists, Accelerate, Simetría, Collide Pro Helvetia, and Collide Geneva
Over the past twenty years, Brighton-based artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have become renowned for their innovative work investigating the material nature of our world and how we experience it through the lens of science and technology. Blending experimental moving image techniques, scientific research and digital technologies, Semiconductor creates first-person experiences that disrupt our everyday assumptions about reality and encourage us to step outside our fixed points in space and time to experience places that are in a constant state of flux.
Semiconductor’s practice often evolves from intensive periods of research in scientific laboratories. In 2015, the artists won the Collide Award and completed a three-month residency at CERN, developing a multimedia body of work that emerged from their artistic research in the laboratory and their interactions with physicists, engineers and staff. Three of these works are now on show in their solo exhibition Spectral Constellations at the Schafhof – European Art Forum in Upper Bavaria.
Following an open call for applications, a jury of cultural and scientific experts awarded Swiss artist Elisa Storelli and Indian artist Rohini Devasher the dual residency as part of Connect, the collaboration framework between Arts at CERN and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia that fosters dialogue between artistic and scientific communities worldwide.
The International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) in Bengaluru is a unique initiative in Indian science with a threefold mandate: to create an in-house research programme of international quality in the theoretical sciences, to link the Indian scientific community with the international community through its programmes to solve some of nature's outstanding problems, and to engage with civil society in spreading awareness of exciting scientific developments and fostering scientific temper.
Arts at CERN and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia have announced Johanna Bruckner as the artist selected for the second edition of Connect, a three-month residency at CERN aimed at Swiss artists with a distinct interest in fundamental science and interdisciplinary approaches.
Johanna Bruckner is a multimedia artist whose work focuses on the performance of the human body and the technologies that affect it. Her installations involve a combination of technological machinery and organic bodies, including videos created with computer graphics software accompanied by sound compositions. Inspired by quantum physics, molecular biology, and the study of hybrid life forms, Bruckner’s work seeks to promote an ecology of care and trust, to create a world where human and non-human beings coexist beyond binary regimes, in harmony with the environment and the technologies that influence it.
In March, CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary announced a three-year partnership through Collide, Arts at CERN’s flagship international residency programme. The first call for Collide Copenhagen invited artists from any country to submit their proposals for a residency between CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary (CC) dedicated to artistic research and artistic exploration, working side-by-side with physicists, engineers, and laboratory staff.
This announcement is followed by the opening of Yet, it moves!, Copenhagen Contemporary’s large new exhibition, which explores the theme of motion as an omnipresent phenomenon, raising our awareness of the many complex movement patterns in which we are all entangled. The exhibiting artists include Collide-winning artists Ryoji Ikeda and Black Quantum Futurism, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jenna Sutela, Ligia Bouton, Helene Nymann, Nina Nowak, Jens Settergren, Cecilia Bengolea, Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm and Nora Turato.
Since 2021, the artists have engaged in dialogue with researchers at the exhibition’s collaborators: Arts at CERN in Geneva; DARK at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen; the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, and ModLab (Digital Humanities Laboratory) at the University of California, Davis. These encounters between artists and scientists have produced artworks with perspectives ranging from particle physics and astrophysics, brain and cognitive sciences, anthropology, and technology and performance studies.
The event horizon is the boundary around a black hole beyond which nothing can escape. It is a point of no return, where the gravitational pull is so strong that even light cannot escape. The information paradox refers to the problem of what happens to information that falls into a black hole. According to the laws of physics, information cannot be destroyed, yet it seems to disappear when it falls into a black hole. The holographic principle, which suggests that all the information contained within a region of space can be encoded on its boundary, is another example of how information can be lost or obscured within a closed system. This principle implies that the universe may be like a hologram, with three-dimensional information projected onto a two-dimensional surface.
During his Connect South Africa residency at CERN, the South African Astronomy Observatory (SAAO), and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), Hassim expanded his artistic research into fundamental physics, modern African astronomy, and ancient indigenous cosmologies in dialogue with physicists and astronomers from the different scientific communities. At the heart of Hassim's work lies an exploration of how information permeates through social, cultural and physical systems based on concepts relating to black holes. In the exhibition Event Horizon, Hassim takes us on a journey through the mysteries of black holes, inviting us to contemplate these complex ideas through our senses and emotions.
The Observatory Project, the collaborative research-led project founded by Eamon Edmundson-Wells and Ziggy Lever in 2017, explores the act of making in relation to scientific processes. They use sound, video, custom-made electronics, and sculptural installation as a means to diagram, interpret, and imagine scientific methods of observation. Central to their project is the renegotiation of the notions of the gallery and the observatory, both traditional sites of experimentation in which communities produce and test knowledge. They develop ‘expanded observatories’, optical, conversational, temporary, web-based, and radio projects to freely explore systems and processes of observation and foster meaningful engagement between artists, scientists, and the public.
Following an international open call launched in collaboration with Copenhagen Contemporary in March, Arts at CERN announced today that Dutch artist Joan Heemskerk is the winner of the first Collide Copenhagen residency award.
Collide is the flagship programme of Arts at CERN, which invites artists worldwide from all creative disciplines to submit proposals for a research-led residency grounded on interactions with CERN’s scientific community. The eleventh edition of Collide, and the first of Collide Copenhagen, attracted 592 project proposals from 90 different countries.
Referencing Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal at CERN that all scientists should be able to exchange ideas, Joan Heemskerk’s project, Alice & Bob after Clay +=-> Hello, world!, seeks to develop a new universal language. Through a re-assessment of the cryptographic characters Alice and Bob, the material clay and the computer programme Hello, World!, the produced message, in the form of a light-beam or a radio-signal or something else entirely, would transcend galactic and life-form boundaries.
Joan Heemskerk will complete a two-month residency, which will be split between CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary and dedicated to artistic research and exploration. She will work side by side with physicists, engineers and laboratory staff.