Survived another day, Day 3 has been 3 x intense!

I spent the morning with local legend Mick Storr, who has been at CERN since 1974. We discussed the material  genealogies of CERN experiments, and Mick showed me around his old haunts, describing the “ghosts” of the experiments and machines that once lived in these sites. Some of the spaces are now used to store old detector parts (such as ATLAS, top left image), some have been repurposed to make new accelerator components (such as the superconducting magnets, bottom left and centre). After a bit of  critical contemplation, he  really engaged with the Indigenous philosophical concept of “everywhen” after I talked to him about different understandings of place, time and being, with some great prompts from the ISEA theme description (see here) and found both personal and collective CERN resonances with this deep concept…

And in other news, I have spent the last 3 days in a kafkaesque labyrinth of bureaucracy too complex and opaque to even explain, trying to reactivate my CERN user access, and at 5pm today it finally seems to work! Such institutional complexity comes with the territory, but I must say it is not for the faint hearted – particle physics seems easy compared to this! But now that I am really here things seem extra-dimensional, and I feel actually finally three dimensionally embedded in this space.