The art of Science

Take 10,000 physicists from over 600 institutions and 100 different countries around the world, place them around a 27km ring and then introduce a lone artist into their midst – what do you get? CERN’s first and only pARTicle collider. Collide@CERN – Creative Collisions Between the Arts and Science – CERN’s first artists residency programme launched in September 2011 was created to bring arts to the same level of selected international excellence and innovation as the science at this world famous laboratory.

But why bring the arts to a laboratory whose main mission is fundamental science and the furtherance of knowledge, including the celebrated hunt for – and possible discovery of – the Higgs Boson?

There is one easy answer – art + science + technology = culture. All are human expressions of our understanding of our place in the universe; they are just completely different ways of expressing it. Professor Robert Winston recently confirmed how important it is for cultural organisations from both arts and science to engage and interact with one another, to show ‘science is an essential part of our culture.’ He made this remark when praising Imperial College London’s engagement with the Exhibition Road Cultural Group, which comprises the Victoria and Albert Museum amongst other outstanding museums and educational institutions.

A science organisation engaging with an arts organisation is also a way of ensuring science has its rightful place in culture too – on an equal stage with the arts. After all, great science has inspired great arts. For example Heisenberg’s uncertainty principles have resulted in some of the great inspirations of the modernist movement such as James Joyce’s Ulysses or Pablo Picasso’s Guernica – which rocked the art world. The impact of the development of ideas in science was profound on the arts.

[caption id="attachment_31347" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Julius von Bismarck Credit: CERN"][/caption]

But equally important is the necessity to ensure that arts and science are interacting at the same level of expertise and mutual recognition. Thus CERN’s first Cultural Policy, called Great Arts for Great Science, was created with the strategic aim of doing just that – matching the culture of selected excellence in science with that of the arts. Using the mechanisms understood by the laboratory – policy and appointing a board which peer reviews arts submissions and activity, including a CERN scientist on the expert panel – were vital ways of embedding the programme in the laboratory. Before this, arts engagement was random, unselected and not subject to peer review.

Just as important was the appointment of a cultural specialist who has worked across arts and science to oversee this operation and the development of the pARTicle collider. As I said publicly to CERN scientists, you wouldn't employ me to run the LHC, even if I did have an O level in physics, so why employ someone who doesn't understand the arts. Whilst this comment was deliberately provocative and tongue-in-cheek, it was designed to ensure that we all seriously think about what constitutes expertise – in both the arts and science – and recognise its explicit value and necessity in the different disciplines.

It was an intervention which sublimely showed how focused physicists are. Many didn't notice the disruptions happening around them and carried on working. Equally the focus of the dancers on being invisible and unseen also created their invisibility

Thus Collide@CERN – Creative Collisions Between Arts and Science – artists residence programme was born as the flagship of the new Cultural Policy and demonstrates these principles of selected excellence. Running for three years, two different artists – one in digital arts and one this year in dance/performance – are selected annually to come to the laboratory at the same level of innovation and excellence as the scientists, following an international open competition judged by an expert jury. The artists, who are in residence for up to three months, are paired with a CERN inspiration partner, expected to blog about their residency as well as interact with the community with interventions and lunchtime encounters all over the laboratory campus.

This programme developed from a four month feasibility study looking at CERN’s arts activity in the past and present, the potential for the future, as well as looking at other arts and science residencies across the world. The result is a tailor-made programme specifically created for this world class particle physics laboratory. As I say often in talks, do not copy the programme developed at CERN for your laboratory or institution – you have to really study the culture, the people and the science to create a programme of any worth or meaning. During the feasibility study I discovered that particle physics is particularly fascinating for artists because the experimentalists and theorists are like the twin souls of an artist. The theorist thinks beyond the paradigm and even beyond the 11 theoretical dimensions of which only four have been proven to exist by classical physics – three of space and one of time. The experimentalist brings the theory down to earth. These are precisely the two activities of the artist.

[caption id="attachment_31348" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Julius von Bismarck and his CERN inspiration partner, Dr James Wells Credit: CERN"][/caption]

The choice of a three month placement is also deliberate. Another discovery of the feasibility study was that particle physics has a strange and bewitching effect on artists. Get too close for too long and an artist seems to lose his/her artistic soul and try to prove that s/he understands it. I watched an established artist lose his confidence during a one year residency and at the end he just created work which tried to prove he could communicate astro-particle physics. Now two years later, he is creating great work again because he is not too close to the science.

This is an important point and fundamental to Collide@CERN. The quest is not to use the arts as a tool for describing and communicating the science – that is illustration, and of course plays an important role in outreach activity. Rather the idea is that arts and science are on the same level, and that the ideas of science, and most crucially of particle physics, look at the world in different and dynamic ways. The term creative collisions was carefully chosen to reflect this. In many ways, we are talking about a return to the time of Leonardo Da Vinci, when art and science were in interplay and exchange – and both had equal value. As Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google said last year, we need arts and science in interplay to be truly innovative in the 21st century. Both are about ways of looking at the world and offer us insights as well as opportunities to really increase the boundaries of our world. And for an organisation to be truly visionary in the 21st century, it needs to engage with both and show its public relevance beyond its borders.

But not all boundaries can be crossed. CERN is publicly funded for its science, engineering and technology by the 20 member states. Therefore the funds for the Collide@CERN cultural programme are fundraised from external sources. Ars Electronica – our three-year cultural partners – provide the prize money for the digital arts strand and private donors the residency costs. The City and Canton of Geneva provide all the funds for the dance/performance residency. This shows the scientists that resources are not being taken from the laboratory but are supplied from outside, as well as enabling the building of cultural partnerships and significant spheres of public influence.

But there are other perceptions to be bridged too.

“Where is the artist’s work?” said one physicist, a month after the first Collide@CERN artist in residence, Julius von  Bismarck, left. I realised this was yet another of many moments in which I was being given the opportunity to impart something really fundamental about the arts world not fully understood in the science world.

“You know how your experiment took 15 years to build? And how physicists work on very long term timelines, which even encompass half their lives, if not their whole ones?”

“Yes” he replied.

“Well artists too take time to make work too.”

[caption id="attachment_31349" align="alignright" width="133" caption="Gilles Jobin and his dancers doing the Strangel performance in the CERN library Credit:CERN"][/caption]

Like everything associated with this programme, I realise more and more that I haven’t created an arts programme; rather it is an organisational change and learning programme. This something which the late Max Boisot – the management consultant who studied the largest collaboration at CERN, ATLAS – insightfully told me.

I also realise why this has not been attempted in many other high level science institutions. Remember NASA’s much vaunted artist in residence, Laurie Anderson? The expectation was that the work she produced would communicate how great NASA was. In the end, her work didn't quite do that, and the programme was dropped. Collide@CERN is attempting an intricate balance and there are days when I think perhaps I am asking too much at a time when CERN has never been such a frenzy of activity and excitement as the world’s largest machine is running at its peak and is set for discovery. But this is what precisely makes it also the right time for artists too. “(If you are a scientist,) it’s not a bad way of life, you subscribe to hyper-rationality, you do better on your finances, keeping your car running, your apartment not falling apart. You can see the payback of hyper-rationality but you lose a bit of humanity in the process. “From the scientist’s point of view, the benefit of the artist is opening your mind, seeing different ways of approaching nature and life, adding more humanity to what you do, thinking about the implications of what you do for fellow humans and nature.” This quote is from Dr James Wells, from the University of Michigan, hidden worlds specialist who was the CERN inspiration partner to Julius von Bismarck. They were mutually matched in a one week introduction visit, before Julius’s residency began in March, followed by a one month residency with Ars Electronica.

Like all the artists in the Collide programme, it is stressed that the residency at CERN is all about research and discovering new ideas. CERN is a research centre after all. No outcomes are expected, although of course if they happen that is great. It is every tribute to CERN that the laboratory has embraced this idea – it is unusual for a science laboratory to have the foresight to give value to the creative research process rather than the outcome.

But having said this, Julius was intent on creating a piece which was shown by Ars Electronica, at their world famous digital arts festival in September, with the intention of it also being installed at CERN in recognition of his time here.

[caption id="attachment_31350" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Gilles Jobin and his dancers doing the Strangel performance in the CERN library Credit:CERN"][/caption]

But that is not all. The artist’s legacy is felt by the CERN community in other ways – through the personal lunchtime encounters as well as interventions across the campus. These are ways of literally putting the scientists in touch with the arts. Julius’s first intervention consisted of leading scientists through the bowels of CERN in the dark through a complex network of passages which they had never been to. They knew the LHC, but they didn't know there were other tunnels running right beneath their feet. The physicists were completely in the dark, and were asked to say what they saw in their minds eye, whilst listened to a recording of the philosopher Bertrand Russell talking about Plato’s cave and representation.

Our second Collide@CERN artist in residence – this time the choreographer Gilles Jobin – did his first intervention in the CERN library which was both insightful and moving. A deliberate provocation, Gilles with two of his dancers, entered the library unannounced where scientists were studying. The concept was that they were invisible strangels – part angels, part strangers, part strangelets – who were briefly visiting from another dimension to eavesdrop on particle physicists and their thoughts. It was an intervention which sublimely showed how focused physicists are. Many didn't notice the disruptions happening around them and carried on working. Equally the focus of the dancers on being invisible and unseen also created their invisibility. It was a powerful testimony to the focus of both arts and science, and those who did notice what was happening, said they were moved to tears.

Ultimately, Collide@CERN and arts and science interactions are about different ways of looking: both artists and scientists at CERN look beyond the visible world, but they have different ways of looking, and crucially they can take each other further.

In the words of Albert Einstein: “I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”

• Author: Ariane Koek

Ariane is an international arts consultant and producer, specialising in developing arts and science interactions and literature. She currently leads on International Arts at CERN, where she initiated and created the laboratory's first cultural policy and Collide@CERN

• Contact: ariane.koek@cern.ch

 

• For more information:  Arts@CERN http://arts.web.cern.ch/