As I bump out my “Dark Waves” installation, and extract myself from the CERNiverse, I ask myself what is all this? And whilst watching the live stream of my “live performance” from the relative safety of the CLEAR control room, I asked myself what was all that? All that technology, complexity, energy, data streams, almost intangible but also so material, manifested almost paradoxically in the tension between the sizes and energies of the massive machines, the accelerators and detectors, and the utterly ephemeral microworld they probe. What exists on the other side of the detectors, what else is hidden within the data, what reality lies beyond the phenomena? What comes after maths?
Responding to quantum physicist Neils Bohr, the father of CERN, philosopher Karen Barad perhaps rhetorically asked “where does the experiment end?” Is it the terminal screen, the computer print out, the journal article, or even the sonification installation? As we look down into the quantum realms of waves and ripples and interactions that are so abstract they need mathematical metaphors, we seem to lose sight that it is ourselves we are looking at. Many of the physicist working on these experiments don’t really see the phenomena behind the experiments and data as “real”, but it is, because it is the world! But CERN, like Robert Johnson, and indeed the world at this moment, is at a crossroads. The LHC has basically done its job, and there is now a questioning of CERN’s future, as it struggles to map a straight path towards a linear future, seemingly at odds with this era of uncertainty.
Yet, from a quantum frame of reference, looking up from below, the world itself would appear ever-changing and unpredictable, a distant shimmering surface, like looking upward from the bottom of a pond, a “liquid reality” (as I shouted out ecstatically on my last day at CERN!).
And as I reflect on the last two months, it too seems like a shimmering dream, another kind of reality, which will take some time to process, which will include a lot of creative processing and project development. But meanwhile, now that I am safe distance from the radioactive zones, I will be able to post some of my renegade projects… stay tuned.