How do you future-proof the future?

This question has been weighing upon me since I stared at CERN; like a Zen koan, it doesn’t quite make sense; it eats itself like a snake devouring its tail.  How can you protect the future from the future?

Strangely, aside from the writings of Wolfgang Pauli, the only other books I read were the CERN founding speeches, featuring the first Director of CERN Felix Bloch speaking on creativity in art and science and the importance of collaboration – this he put into a time capsule placed under the CERN foundation stone (which i spent a few weeks trying to find, another tale to be told later maybe). But his call to collaborate resonated with me – this is something that science has lead the way on, and perhaps it is time for large scale art collaborations. The other book was the “Accelerate Manifesto”, which was hanging around in the CLEAR control room, . Perhaps, as CLIC is / was part of an alternate future CERN, they have a kind of anarchistic freedom to do all sorts of experiments, freed from the control of bureaucratic systems necessary for projects such as the LHC and FCC. 

Can you anticipate uncertain futures? This is where “accelerationism” resonates – however accelerationism can be dangerous medicine, like snake poison as anti-venom. Initially developed as a very left post-anarchist conceptual framework for challenging the all-consuming juggernaut of capitalism, this movement has bizarrely become associated with ultra-right nihilist idiocy. Yet radical times require radical medicine, and we have to be prepared, as we have been so long, for all sorts of situations, especially when faced with far-right political spasming into the mainstream across the globe, manifestations of the evil of banality, signs of dark times. A way to beat such extremism is to creativity anticipate extreme possibilities, through speculative accelerationisms.

I found another seemingly paradoxical condition at CERN – larger and more complicated accelerators are easier to make. Why? Because in CERN’s early days they had to create completely new inventions and infrastructures. There are now complex bureaucratic infrastructures that allow for massive projects that were never possible. So the bigger and more complex the project is, the easier it is to do (at least according to some). But aside from that magic magnet, all I saw of the FCC were PPT slides, plus a strange silence or void where any concrete data might be.

And yet this is what the FCC and indeed moving into the future is about, embracing the unknown and “welcoming uncertainty” as art/science champion astronomer Roger Malina states. The LHC was built to test predictions which were raised half a century ago. The FCC proposes to push us beyond the standard model, into truly unpredictable realms of the subatomic universe. As Patti Smith said “I want to go beyond the beyond”.

Some more footage from my “Dark Waves” experiments at CMS…

Above, a “dark riff” somehow manifested from the FCC magnet resonances modulating my synth oscillators (with no samples or sequencers). A dark vibe manifested and spatialised thru the 8 channel CMS sound system, ideal for dark matter day.

The CMS nucleus – some great “crane cam” footage of me trying to bring sounds to the surface of the LHC accelerator and CMS collision data, as the detector itself was capturing data from the billion high energy collisions occurring every second, literally 100 metres below me (I am standing on the “plug” over the shaft that goes down to the detector cavern).

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.

For Dark Matter Day, October 31, the final day of my fellowship at CERN, I performed a live improvised sonification / spatialisation of data I have collected from various parts of the LHC accelerator and CMS detector, on the 8 channel “CMS soundsystem”, set up literally right above the detector itself. It was quite an event, to say the least!

In a way, this event was the culmination and final manifestation of 2 months of my activities at CERN. I created a composition which was a journey through CERN, both my personal journey, and alsoa journey traversing scales of space, time and energy, starting with the macroscopic and ending up in a very different world… this is the journey of the protons as they go from the start of the accelerator complex, through the various accelerators and finally collide in the CMS detector to create exotic subatomic entities, resonances that exist for billionths of a second at trillions of electron volts of energy. But what do all these extreme sounding numbers and scales mean, and to frame it in an expressive way, what might it feel like, what might it sound like?

This was my final challenge! And being “Dark Matter Day”, curiously celebrated on Halloween, it had to have a dark matter spin on it (and it was a dark and very foggy day & night). Luckily, years ago I collaborated with CERN scientist Wolfgang Adam on sonifying the “missing energy” in the CMS detector, which could possibly be dark matter, so this was to be the culminating part of my live composition. The event began with a very engaging discussion I had with a dark matter physicist who works at CMS, Roberto Salerno. However, ironically the best conversation was not recorded, which is often the way, a kind of media “observer effect”, so when the camera was on me I suddenly sounded quite blithe, referring to the experiment as “those things you do” (instead of our unrecorded banter about baryonic acoustic oscillations, acknowledging Vera Rubin, the unsung dark matter pioneer, and me challenging the Standard Model of physics with Modified Newtonian Dynamics and such radical counterparadigmatics!)

I then presented a “sonic taxonomy” of the different sounds and data I had gathered, giving the live (and online) audience a bit of a lexicon or language to maybe help them understand the journey we were about to undertake. And then, when it was time to (literally) flick the switch and turn on my “analog laptop”, I threw my compositional notes / score out the window (see pic below (in fact when I showed the CMS chair my composition, their jaw literally dropped open in horror). Instead, I went full dark, waves of noise, volume at 11, and it was “something else”… It should be noted that it was all improvised and 100% analog, with no sequencing or “normal” samples, except for the sonified data as modulation input – in this way I wanted the experiments – the machines, the detectors – to play the synthesizers (with a bit of subjective tuning on my part just to help find the harmonics:)

I don’t know how the audience felt, but after the first few minutes they had all backed away! The “future field” magnet (see this post) really resonated the system in a way that I had never seen / heard before. At the end someone asked me if I would be able to repeat the same thing, and I said not at all – it was a unique experiment. But after, one person after said to me that it was unlike anything they’d ever experienced before, so it must have worked, at least for some!

Click here to watch the full video (with interview):
https://www.youtube.com/live/SZKxZPKFMDY?feature=shared

Click here for the performance:
https://www.youtube.com/live/SZKxZPKFMDY?feature=shared&t=1774

Finally back at CMS Point 5, Michael Hoch is back, I am back on the  French side, at the “Hoch Chateau”, and things feel like they have come full circle… And as the fog sets in, we are setting things up for a big event for Dark Matter Day, Thursday October 31. We’re getting the band back together!

I took part in the “Mycocosm” exhibition at Barcelona Design Week, with a “nuclear mushroom” from CERN. This was growing above the old Proton Synchrotron booster ring. Curiously, a big mushroom ring has just sprouted around this site, just near the entrance to the PS accelerator (which emits radiation when active which is most of the time). I tested the mushroom with a scintillator detector, which sensed no emissions  (not to say that the mushroom was or was not radioactive, it’s just that there was nothing detected at that moment (and many things, such as bananas, are naturally radioactive)).

For most CERN scientists, measurement is most important, the measurement makes the phenomena “real” in relation to human observation. I have been reading lectures by Wolfgang Pauli on this issue – Pauli was one of the giants of 20th century particle physics, and a friend of Carl Jung. Pauli wrote on the complex relationships between phenomena and measurement, theory and experiment, which he connected with Jungian archetypes and personal experience. Pauli is famous for critically saying “it’s not even wrong”. He was known to be very superstitious, but was also prone to strange accidents – many times when he walked into a lab the experiments would stop working and machines would spontaneously blow up. This became known as the “Pauli effect” (sounds kind of familiar…!)

In reading Pauli, I have also been seeking interconnections between quantum and nonhuman agents, as well as quantum / human connections (I am not going to say entanglements, that’s my other project!) There is agency in the particle apparatuses at CERN, but what about biological nonhuman agents which inhabit this space, which also exist beneath the surface of our direct perception?

I was most excited to (basically smuggle) my mycelial specimen to Catalonia, where I was hosted by the amazing and generous Roger Paez from Elisava Design School, where the exhibition was held. I  stored and displayed the decaying specimen in a hermetic enclosure used for delicate accelerator components. I visualised the sound data of my previous mycelial growth experiment (ironically I didn’t have the right detectors at CERN), and with a bit of graphic tweaking the resultant visuals suggest a different type of decay to what was measured in my previous project, that of mycelium consuming decaying organic matter. This work speculates upon the recent discovery that a strain of mycelium has developed the ability to break down and absorb nuclear materials and radioactive waste, which raises the question: do mushrooms like radioactive decay?

In a “back from the future” moment, I went back out to the seemingly abandoned west zone of CERN (see this early “zone” post). In an old building that no one else seems to inhabit (there’s even deceased scientists’ name-tags still on the doors), I discovered one of the most amazing experiments yet! Mike Korazinos, polymath and particle physics flaneur, has invented a revolutionary new type of magnet, which is 3D printed, with sinusoidal undulations embedded in its surface. This is something utterly unique – it is the first magnet of its kind in the world!!

This device is basically the first prototype of an accelerator magnet  for the proposed “Future Circular Collider”. Finally I have found a material manifestation of this future technology … and this thing is fucking amazing!!! I used my induction coil to detect its field and see how it resonates, and whether it “sings”, and the resonant  tones that came out were perfectly vibrant, way beyond the dirty dipole from the LHC I previously experimented with (see this post). Even though my detector broke in the process, it captured the magneto-acoustics, and at the very least, showed that the fields this magnet creates are very pure. In this obscure zone I could feel the future!

For a change of pace, I have spent some time at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), a particle accelerator complex near Zurich, a kind of companion laboratory to CERN (some say it’s the “boutique” version!) It definitely has a different feel, smaller and more compact overall, and thus more tangible in a way. And just by chance, a group of CLIC / CLEAR physicists were there at the same time as me, all visiting my old mate and collaborator Tom Lucas, who has been developing harmonic resonators and electron guns. Some of the CLIC technologies have gone into the linear accelerator The XFEL is a linear particle accelerator almost (or just!) a kilometre long. called the X-Ray free electron laser (XFEL), which we all found very exciting and inspiring … in a way, it was like getting the band back together!

Here is  an “acccelerated timelapse” video sketch of the linear accelerator which I did on the accelerating train back to CERN.

In memory of Ollie Olsen, an inspiring sonic visionary and pioneer of exploratory and electronic music, who sadly passed away last week.

I have been working with some of the LHC magnets around the Large Magnet Facilities (see post) – this lovely little dipole really kicks when you find the resonance, and using my magic induction coil wand, I can feel the invisible magnetic fields and make it sing..!

Tonight @ 5pm, an in-situ intervention in the CLIC lab test module.
Here’s some lo-fi live video snippets of the electro-acoustic accelerator activation, a kind of resonance feedback experiment. The accelerator itself is transmitting and emitting the sound, which is all created from analogue voltages (and no samples or sequencers), and there are no speakers. The setup works with the material and acoustic resonances of the accelerator’s structure and (non-working) beam tube, using 4 transducer exciter speakers and a contact mic to create a feedback system, with the sound/energy travelling along the length of the accelerator setup. Plus there is a bit of live tuning and tweaking to find the right pulses and frequencies.

And a Saturday night reprise, with slightly better video quality…
(and this reveals what was the mystery delivery was, it is my “analogue laptop”! : )