Friday 11 June, 5:30pm, physical event at Plaça de Joan Coromines (Barcelona, Spain)
Artistic knowledge differs significantly from scientific or technological knowledge, although they might share some common grounds which makes possible a fertile interrelationship. Scientists, technologists, curators, artists and philosophers will discuss the key aspects around research and production of practices that merge art, science, technology and society. They will invite us to reflect on them through their professional activities and projects.
Speakers include Mónica Bello, curator and head of Arts at CERN; Remedios Zafra, writer and scientist at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC); Gerfried Stocker, artistic director of Ars Electronica, and Michela Magas, designer and innovation specialist.
This event is part of the Barcelona City and Science Biennial. Watch the live stream.
Tuesday 29 June, 10am (BST). Book your free place
The event will include:
Introduction to the V&A's Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser exhibition
Introduction to CERN, their research and experiments, and the Arts at CERN programme
Behind the scenes live streamed guided tour of the ALICE experiment.
Q&A with our speakers. Speakers include Dr Despina Hatzifotiadou, physicist and researcher in the ALICE experiment; Mónica Bello, Curator and Head of Arts at CERN, and Kate Bailey, Senior Curator and Producer at V&A.
You can find the teachers' pack here.
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Alan Bogana’s singular artistic practice focuses on the exploration of the interactions within a vast array of natural phenomena. These interests are deeper explored by applying different media and amplifying their range through series of mesmerising art pieces designed to make us observers of the rhythms and dynamics of the ephemeral phenomena that are particularly related to light, minerals, fluids, and crystals.
In Ionize, Ionize!, Bogana investigates the materiality of scintillators. Scintillators are materials that convert energy lost by ionising radiation into pulses of light. They are some of the most commonly used active materials in particle physics, particularly in particle detectors, with applications in medicine, such as cancer therapy. To create this visually striking video work, Bogana filmed in a scintillation detector factory in Utrecht, where he examined the unique properties of these materials. In this work, he reflects on the invisible signals in nature and how they exist without us noticing. He encourages us to consider the surrounding non-human phenomena that are presently sensed thanks to experimental technologies and research materials, and how curiosity shapes human knowledge.
Alan Bogana was in residency at CERN as part of Simetría 2019. Commissioned by Arts at CERN. Shot at Scionix, Bunnik, Holland. Soundtrack by Jean du Lac.Texts inspired by J D Bernal’s “The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul” (1929), Kevin Kelly’s “What technology wants” (2010), and Stuart Firestein’s “Ignorance – How it drives science” (2012).
Text by Mónica Bello
In Whiteout, Rosa Menkman tells the story of an exhausting mountain hike during a snowstorm. As she makes her way up the mountain, she experiences the loss of her physical sensations, leading to an inability to see, hear, or orient herself and the over-saturation of the environment itself. And while steadily moving forward, the spatial dimensions that were at first seemingly wiped out, start to offer themselves in new ways.
What does it mean to navigate a grey, dimensionless space? To move without visual or auditory references or to physically plot a course when there is no conventional sense of direction or even horizon? For Menkman, the experience of Whiteout is one of “slices of consciousness, and traversing a virtual axis to nowhere. A landscape with multiple horizons, in which orientation between top and bottom does not exist except within the wanderer's mind. And even though things seemed to happen in the same space, this state created different places, all layered at once.
Rosa Menkman was in residency at CERN as part of Collide 2019. Whiteout is based on an essay of the same title, originally written for AX15 AX15 (a project by Mario de Vega in collaboration with Rosa Menkman, 2019) and inspired by her time during the artist's Collide residency at CERN, her climb of the Brocken and a voyage on board of a ship of the Chilean army to Antarctica. The Whiteout essay was re-published In Photoresearcher 33 (2020).
Text by the artist
Through the AEgIS* is a space-time-lapse that explores how we make sense of nature through the language of science. Captured by the AEgIS experiment at CERN, which looks at how antimatter responds to gravity, you see pions, protons and nuclear fragments flying out from ‘annihilation sites’; these particles ionize a photographic plate which when developed reveals their trajectories as varying sized tracks. Using a special microscope with a very shallow depth of field, the photographic image is re-captured in several stages; by shifting the focal plane in 2-micron steps, and by scanning across each layer in 1000’s of sections, this reveals a depth to the emulsion of forty layers and details that would otherwise remain unseen to the naked eye. Working with around 100,000 scans, Semiconductor have re-constructed the photographic image to produce an animation that re-introduces time back into the data, revealing the rhythms and artefacts of the capturing process. It gradually zooms out from one scan, whilst moving through the layers, to reveal all of the data. A large print version of Through the AEgIS shows all of the data, visible at once, with time removed.
Semiconductor were in residency at CERN as part of Collide 2015, and this work was produced through Collide. Special thanks to Dr. Michael Doser, research physicist at CERN.
* Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy (AEgIS)
Text by the artists
Putting a narrative film and a sculpture in dialogue, the installation Mass is based on the original matter, Æther, which has served as a backcloth for many creation myths, before finding an echo in the recent discoveries of quantum physics. The immersive experience between reality and science fiction unfolds in a video and scenographic environment, suggesting a theatre set. In the narrative film, June Balthazard and Pierre Pauze staged eminent scientists in their own roles: Chiara Mariotti (CERN particle physicist, EPS Emmy Noether Laureate 2018) and Michel Mayor (Astrophysicist, Nobel Prize 2019). The story takes place in an imaginary world in which a long-announced ecological disaster has occurred. In this tale of anticipation, humanity, plunged into a long night, faces an unprecedented crisis. While waiting for the dawn, scientists seek to understand this enigmatic natural phenomenon. The stretched night pushes them into existential questioning. They wonder about a vibratory substance that, in ancient beliefs as in the most current science, would link humanity and nature.
In the sculptural part, the artists deliver their version of a cosmos. The sculpture imitates elements of nature, like a model or a set. This imaginary landscape evokes pieces of planets. June Balthazard and Pierre Pauze have worked in an empirical way, filming the sculpture as a microcosm or laboratory. In particular, they filmed machines nested inside the sculpture, which animate matter thanks to vibrations. Through this sensory process, they gave a presence to the vibratory substance, normally invisible. The two films, presented side by side, put in co-presence the characters who are seeking this substance and the substance that seems to take shape, animating matter in a supernatural way. The sculpture is exposed inactive, as a piece of archaeology or the trace of a lost world.
Mass was presented in a world premiere at the Taipei Biennial 2020, and shown in the exhibition Arts at CERN: when art and particle physics collide at CosmoCaixa in 2021, as part of the Barcelona City and Science Biennial. This work was originally commissioned by Hermès Horloger, Bienne, Switzerland.
Developed after their Collide residency, HALO is a large-scale immersive artwork conceived as an “experiential reworking” of the raw data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Reminiscent of the detector's architecture, HALO takes the form of a ten-metre-wide cylinder-shaped structure that is surrounded by vertical piano wires standing four metres tall.
The structure houses a 360-degree screen on which visitors can observe data projections generated by a series of slowed-down particle collisions that ordinarily occur almost at the speed of light at the ATLAS Detector. As they hit the screen, the animated data points also trigger small hammers to hit the surrounding vertical piano wires, producing vibrations that resonate throughout the artwork. This multisensory experience invites us to consider the philosophical problems of our mediated understandings of science and nature while submitting ourselves completely to what Semiconductor names their "technological sublime".
HALO is an Audemars Piguet Art Commission, curated by Mónica Bello and first presented in Art Basel in Basel in 2018. In collaboration with CERN. In 2021, HALO premiered in the UK at the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts as part of the Brighton Festival.
Mariele Neudecker’s The Eye: A.L.I.C.E immerses the viewer in the underground world of the ALICE experiment. The film provides a lens into the physicists’ endeavour to study the essential constituents of matter, mirrored by a scientist’s narration revealing the unique mechanism of vision. As a Guest Artist in 2019, Neudecker captured the beauty of this experiment's scale, extremes, and complexity. This work premiered in the Victoria & Albert museum's exhibition Alice: Curioser and Curioser.
This commission was made possible thanks to the support to Arts at CERN of the Didier and Martine Primat Foundation and its special fund Odonata as part of a multi-year partnership and grant scheme which aims to foster creative interactions between arts, sciences and nature.
With many thanks to Despina Hatzifotiadou (A.L.I.C.E. Director, CERN Physicist), Monica Bello (Director: Arts at CERN), Alan Litke (Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz), Benjamin Jones (camera), Simone Einfalt (Studio Mariele Neudecker) and the V&A Museum, London.
The Eye [A.L.I.C.E. | A Large Ion Collider Experiment | V1] was made for the exhibition ‘Alice: Curiouserand Curiouser’, V&A London and touring. Filmed in CERN January 2020. Editing: Mariele Neudecker © 2021