The winner of the first Collide Geneva Award was Gilles Jobin. He was awarded for his proposal to explore through interventions and dance the relationship between mind and body at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. the jury recognized Jobin for his intense interest in CERN and his increasing and evolving fascination with science, as shown by his most recent work, Spider Galaxies, which used data from the LHC to generate music and movement.
Cécile B Evans’ multimedia work examines how we evaluate emotion and its rebellion in contemporary society as it comes into contact with ideological, physical, and technological structures. In June, Evans made a short field trip to the Laboratory as part of a research project around the production of reality. ‘Beyond the excitement of visiting experimental sites, which are profoundly inspiring, speaking to physicists was an edifying highlight’, remarks Evans about their visit.
In their practice, Evans has extensively questioned data and network infrastructures and our relationship to technological interfaces. Building upon these interests, Evans engaged in conversations with Senior Communications Advisor James Gilles to dive into the history of the World Wide Web, invented in 1989 by scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at the Laboratory. These explorations into how network structures shape our emotional lives manifest in their films’ ‘hyperlinked narratives’, where the protagonists are disjointed, interlinked, and move in multiple directions to develop thematic metaphors that bring audiences deeper into complex ideas. To gather inspiration for their networked storytelling, they also discussed CERN’s environment, culture and stories, spanning almost 70 years since the first foundation stone was laid.