Afrofuturismo cuántico
Black Quantum Futurism spoke to El País about their practice, their incoming residency at CERN and Barcelona, and their Collide project 'CPT Symmetry and Violations'.
Black Quantum Futurism spoke to El País about their practice, their incoming residency at CERN and Barcelona, and their Collide project 'CPT Symmetry and Violations'.
Ahead of the V&A's landmark Alice in Wonderland exhibition, deputy editor of Elephant Magazine Louise Benson takes a rare visit to Cern and explores the surprising connection between Lewis Carroll’s story and quantum physics.
Miquel Molina writes on the art and science scene in Barcelona and highlights the exhibition Arts at CERN: when art and particle physics collide at CosmoCaixa during the City and Science Biennial.
Artist and composer Yunchul Kim spoke to Nature about his Collide residency at CERN, the artworks resulting from his research in the Laboratory, and his experience working with Helga Timko, a CERN accelerator physicist at CERN.
The exhibition also includes a film (by Mariele Neudecker) that transports visitors to the subterranean wonderland of the ALICE experiment in the Hadron Collider (the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider and the largest machine in the world) at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research).
Two artists are presenting their work inspired by their research at CERN at the V&A exhibition “Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser”
Carroll’s polymathic mind finds its emblem in a carousel of Victorian novelties: theodolite, kaleidoscope, daguerreotype, dodo. His heroine debates concepts about logic and language like a junior Wittgenstein. Matter, space and time are all explored as the rabbit tries to catch up with himself and Alice alternately shrinks and grows. A film by the German artist Mariele Neudecker centres on the so-called Alice experiment at Cern, where the tiniest particles in the universe are studied with the largest machines.
With a practice spanning sculpture, video, painting, photography and sound, Mariele Neudecker investigates the formation and historical dissemination of cultural constructs around the natural and technological world. Throughout her three-decade career, the artist has engaged with scientists and engineers, as well as their research and methodologies, participating in Arts at CERN's Guest Artists programme several times. Since her first short stay in the Laboratory in 2014, Neudecker came again four times between 2016 and 2020 to engage with CERN's research and community.
In 1787, Swiss physicist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure climbed the 4810-metre-high Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, with a clear goal in mind: to demonstrate that the blueness of the sky changes with height. In the following years, Saussure developed the Cyanometer – an instrument to measure the intensity of the colour of the sky, consisting of a circle of paper dyed in increasingly deep blues. The current scientific community seems, however, incurious about its distinct hues. The latest report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has left us feeling full of despair for the planet's future. Still, it does not direct our gaze up to the 'unequivocal' impact of human activities in the sky blueness.
Sharing Saussure's fascination, Swiss artists Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller have for several years dealt in their artistic practice with the colour changes of the sky due to the global climate crisis and geopolitical choices. From their work with climate scientists, the artists admitted being surprised by the lack of scientific interest in the sky's blueness. “Climate researchers assume that the colour of the sky has already changed and will continue to change in the future. The argument of Reto Knutti, a climatologist at ETH Zurich, affirming that the sky colour is not a relevant scientific value, provoked us. We thought that this is where art has to come into play.”