Black Hole Descending A Staircase, C. Henschke, 2004, digital print, 200cm x 200cm, National Gallery of Australia.

It’s Day One, again! Somehow I have returned to CERN, drawn back into its universe. 2026 is the Centenary of the Schrödinger wave function, another celebratory milestone of quantum physics. After 2025, the year of quantum uncertainty and collapse, I fell through a black hole, came out the other side, and somehow survived, like the phoenix particle. I have come back to CERN to function in the “Science Art Dialogue Week”, in part to creatively interrogate quantum states such as superposition. Wandering down the dark hallways, and discovering obscure experiments with Schrödinger’s cats, I already feel welcomed back. And again big questions shimmer in the ice-cold Geneva air, and on the CERN blackboards, such as “What are we?”

The “Science Art Dialogue Week”, set up by Dr Michael Hoch from the art@cms / Origins program, features a very inspiring collection of people from the Kunstuniversität Graz, Radio ORF, Florida State University, University of Alabama, and RMIT. I will be posting more about this over the coming week. But also I will engage with a more personal question – why am I here (at CERN:) or, more fundamentally, what keeps drawing me back?