It’s Day 0!
This is a photo I took just over a decade ago, my first time in the arcing tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider, a circular particle accelerator 28 kilometres in diameter, the largest scientific experiment in the world. I was with a curious collection of artists and scientists: Donna Kendrigan, artist;  Ariane Koek, director of art@CERN; Ralph Steinhagen, accelerator physicist; Bill Fontana, artist; Roger Rassool, physicist; and Mark Boland, accelerator physicist and ANAT board member (see video of the event). There was a palpable energy in the air, one could kind of smell the energies from the trillions of electron volts of energy in the particles which speed around this ring millions of times a second…

A decade later I am set to return to CERN, to conceptually and materially re-explore this hidden universe buried beneath the pastoral landscape around Geneva. And if the LHC seems vast and hard to comprehend (as it did then), CERN are now developing the Future Circular Collider, an accelerator 80 kilometres in diameter. If the LHC experiment led to the discovery / creation of the “God particle”, what will the FCC reveal and manifest? Worlds beyond the “standard model” of physics (which explains basically all of the universe we can perceive).. but maybe nobody knows! And what might I discover on my ANAT fellowship at CERN? I really don’t know!!