“Cultural Collisions” is an interdisciplinary exhibition, lecture and workshop series based on the art@CMS methodology. The “Cultural Collisions in Canada” event creates a learning experience for students and teachers to integrate Science and the Arts. It is a novel concept and an innovative and experimental collaboration in itself. ORIGIN is a network involving several Astrophysics and High Energy Physics experiments and research centres. ORIGIN’s purpose is to setup national Cultural Collisions learning and research experiences, in close partnership with local institutes, educators and decision makers.

ORIGIN participating Science Institutions: ATLAS, Canadian Light Source, CMS, LIGO/VIRGO, Muographer, Perimeter Institute, Univ. Toronto,

Educative institution: Ontario Ministry of Education, EU project CREATIONS

Venue: Ontario Science Centre OSC / Toronto – Canada

Participating artists: Clelia Anchisi, Peter Bellamy, Consensus, Bree Corn, Xavier Cortada, Alison Gill, Chris Henschke, Michael Hoch, Rosa Nussbaum, Paul Schuster, Anastasia Solay, Sara Steigerwald,  Brigitte Tessier, Scott Wilson.

This first exhibition is designed for  students ‘research & inspiration’ by means of exhibition, lectures and workshops. The second exhibition will be focussing on presenting the student artworks. Vernissage in the OSC will be on May 30^th.

The all experience is an education research project of the Ontario Ministry of Education and will be evaluated.

Program of the week:

Monday : opening presentations / Science Flash Mob / Artist presentation/ Science Rap performance / Exhibition exploration.

Tuesday till Friday : introductory talks, 4 science workshops in parallel followed by science topic talks,  lunch, art topic talk followed by  4 creative workshops and exhibition exploration.

Saturday & Sunday: Exhibition exploration for the general public.

The Ontario Ministry of Education has invited art@CMS to create a cross-disciplinary traveling exhibition. The format will be that of the “Montenegro Science Festival exhibition”: science & art exhibition, lectures, discussions, art and science workshops. The first exhibition will be April 9^th – 15^th 2018 at the Ontario Science Centre. There will be a follow-up exhibition with artworks only in June.

Organization: Ministry of Education (general organisation, education advisor, evaluation)

Exhibition curation: art@CMS

Scientific curation & consultancy: ORIGIN

ORIGIN is a network involving several Astrophysics and High Energy Physics experiments and research centres. ORIGIN’s purpose is to setup national Cultural Collisions learning and research experience, in close partnership with local institutes, educators and decision makers.

“Cultural Collisions” is an interdisciplinary exhibition, lecture and workshop series based on the art@CMS methodology. The “Cultural Collisions in Canada” event will create a learning experience for students and teachers to integrate Science and the Arts. It is a novel concept and an innovative and experimental collaboration in itself.

Participating experiments and research centres for ORIGIN-Canada: art@CMS, ATLAS experiment at CERN, CMS Experiment at CERN, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, Light Source Canada, LIGO scientific collaboration, Ontario Science Center, Perimeter Institute, University of Toronto.

10 students and 3 professors from the art school of Lille, and the director of the Lille museum (“Espace Croisé”) came to CERN and visited CMS, the Anti-matter Factory, the Synchrocyclotron, and other experimental facilities. The collaboration was based on the successful model used in Vienna.

The students produced artworks for a forthcoming exhibition in 2018 at several venues:

• January 26 – February 8 :  Gallerie Commune ESA (opening 25-Jan at 6pm)
• March 30 – April 27 :  Espace Croisé  (opening 29 March at 6.30 pm)
• May 23 – September 21 : Espace Culture, Université (opening 22 May at 6pm)

A catalogue of the artworks including articles from physicists will be presented.

During 3 days, 1000 students starting from 6 years of age visited an exhibition of art and science that was held at a science festival in Podgorica, Montenegro. They participated in artistic and scientific workshops and attended lectures and discussions. A “junior scientific booklet” with games and questions about the exhibition was also designed and distributed to guide them around.

See more pictures of the event here.

The High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the European Physical Society has decided to give the 2017 Outreach Prize to art@CMS founder Michael Hoch “for initiatives highlighting the conceptual and physical beauty of high-energy physics, and the inspirational qualities that are common to both Art and Science”. The committee acknowledged “Michael Hoch’s exceptional talent in bringing scientific thoughts to the minds of the general public”, and added that “through the pieces of art created by him and others, combined with his sparkling and contagious enthusiasm, he fascinates the audience with today’s fundamental questions and research challenges”. The award ceremony will take place during the EPS-HEP 2017 conference in Venice from July 5th to 12th.

The Global Science Opera’s second opera production , entitled be “Ghost Particles”, took place in November 19, 2016. Inspired by particle physics, “Ghost Particles” is about photons, neutrinos and, of course, the discovery of the Higgs boson. The scientific concept was provided by Dr. Sofoklis Sotiriou (EA, Greece), and was realized as a dialogue with the art@CMS programme at the CMS Experiment at CERN. GSO 2016 has been a cooperation with the European Commission’s Horizons 2020 Project CREATIONS. It has also provided a research focus for the Norwegian Research Council’s project iSCOPE.

The various opera scenes were created and performed by the schools and universities in the GSO countries, in some cases, such as Scotland, Kuwait and Vietnam, joining GSO for the first time. The opera also included a virtual visit to CERN, with CMS high-energy physicist Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez introducing more than 1,000 viewers into the amazing world of science, engineering and technology at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.

The “Ghost Particles” story continues the saga of Joao and his friends, Firefly and Little Girl. In the “Ghost Particles” synopsis, Joao receives a book from his father, and reads about various cultures’ and ages’ concept of matter. He is excited about the story of Wolfgang Pauli, who imagined a particle, leading to an exploration spanning over decades. Joao wants to imagine his own particle, but is rejected, and told that it would take many years, perhaps centuries, before that would be possible. Desperate to realize his dream, he invites his friends from around the globe to help him. Together, they study the Ghost Particles (photons, neutrinos, and Higgs Boson), and finally, they imagine a particle of their own. They seek the help of the CMS Experiment in order to describe it, and then send a message to the world, inspired by Pauli’s famous radioactive speech: “Dear Creative Ladies and Gentlemen….”

Watch the complete “Ghost Particles” opera HERE

[article reproduced from APS Physics website]

Collaboration with artists is fostering creativity in research labs and enabling physics to reach new audiences.

Three wide arrowheads, a wavy squiggle, followed by two straight lines connected in a V shape. Minimal graphical representations such as this translate pages of mathematics describing the behavior of subatomic particles into the language of Feynman diagrams, which is accessible to everyone regardless of their scientific background. It was this simplicity that inspired Andy Charalambous, a conceptual artist based in London, to use Feynman diagrams as the focus of his recent series of sculptures, and photographs.

Charalambous is an engineer turned artist, whose artwork is stimulated by physics. “It’s hard not to be creative,” he says, when you are surrounded by all the brilliant ideas that scientists are working on. In 2011, he approached Mark Lancaster, head of the high-energy physics group at University College London (UCL), about a possible art residency and has had a desk in their offices ever since. Charalambous is also involved in art@CMS, an education and outreach program run by the particle-physics experiment called CMS at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The collaborations give Charalambous easy access to scientists, whose brains he can pick about physics research or to fact-check his projects. “We make sure he doesn’t do something that is scientifically crazy,” said Lancaster, who checked the Feynman diagrams on which Charalambous’s sculptures are based.

But physics isn’t solely a muse for Charalambous’s creative output. He is also interested in broadening science participation and reaching out to new audiences. To outsiders, physics can be hard to penetrate because of its technical terminology and equations. Art allows these barriers to be stripped away and scientific ideas to be conveyed in their simplest form. Taking a single scientific concept, like neutrinos or singularity, as his starting point, Charalambous transforms it into artwork that art lovers and scientists alike can connect with. And once they have been drawn in, the art provides a platform for an interested viewer to explore the physics that motivated the piece.

“I get a buzz when the audience sees a bit of science through my art and starts to realize what [the science] is all about,” says Charalambous. He hopes that encountering physics through art can help to make physics more accessible and less exclusive.

Wider participation in science is an issue that resonates with the physicists Charalambous works with. According to Lancaster, the outreach activities organized by UCL’s physics department are geared towards high-school students already studying science. Art can reach a different set of people who wouldn’t normally seek science out. Having artists in the lab also benefits Ph.D. students and postdocs. “They get to meet a different cross section of people and get out of their cloistered environments,” says Lancaster. These interactions can spur new ideas and directions for their research. “Collaborations with artists not only make what we are doing accessible to the public, they also encourage creativity in our teams,” says Austin Ball, the technical coordinator at the CMS experiment, who has worked with Charalambous. “An idea for an [alternative] layout of a detector [at CERN] was inspired by artwork that was inspired by a detector. You can see the feedback going on.”

Art and physics are often considered polar opposites of one another. Breaking down this misconception could encourage a wider variety of people into science, who would bring with them new perspectives on how to tackle the big scientific problems. “Both disciplines need creativity, initiative, and out-of the-box thinking,” says Ball, who sees considerable overlap between his work at CERN—overseeing the design, construction, and maintenance of CMS—and that of visiting artists.

Ball worked with Charalambous to put together his Feynman-inspired sculptures. It turns out that building a sculpture in stainless steel and constructing detectors aren’t so different—both require specialist welding for example. Charalambous wanted the sculpture to appear as if it were floating in space. Nothing can freely float (at least on Earth) so they put their heads together and came up with a support design that used the minimum possible material. According to Ball, it didn’t feel any different to working on a lightweight detector, which for performance reasons would be impeded by heavy supports. “All of us had as much fun helping Andy to realize his artistic idea as we do turning a concept for a new detector into a real working thing,” says Ball.

–Katherine Wright

SYΝTHESIS 748, art@CMS & SCIENCE VIEW

present

« 10^-22 sec » 

a solo choreographic performance for the Athens Science Festival 2016

Thirty artworks by international artists show the discovery of the Higgs boson in an exhibition at Castello Giusso in Vico Equense, Italy. The exhibition consists of sculptures, paintings, photo collages, textiles, digital and video installations, all inspired by the challenges at the frontier of knowledge of the great accelerator of CERN, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the passion of thousands of physicists who work there, and the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. Most of the works were created in the framework of art@CMS, an education and outreach programme of the CMS experiment. CMS is one of the four large detectors, which like giant cameras capture the collisions of counter rotating beams of proton inside the LHC ring. Since 2012, art@CMS has brought together artists, researchers, students and educators into creative projects aimed at public outreach and engagement. “Each of the works on display”, says Prof. Pierluigi Paolucci at INFN who oversees this exhibition,  “is the result of collaboration between an artist and a scientist, who ventured into each other’s world. And what is novel about it is that the artistic and the scientific research can converge when their starting point is the same”. One of the additions to this exhibition is the interactive installation “The Gift of Mass“, realised by INFN in collaboration with Embrio.net and Paolo Scoppola. The installation creates an immersive environment in which visitors can  experience the “impossible”, that is to acquire their mass as elementary particles did at a very young Universe. The exhibition also includes several contributions by Neapolitan artists, including the mosaic with pieces of baked bread, entitled “Big Bang”, a creation of actor Francesco Paolantoni.

The exhibition will be open for public viewing daily from 09:00 – 13:00 & 15:00 – 18:00 until 6 May 2016.

Thursday 17th March 2016 19:30-22:00pm

In collaboration with the Art@CMS project at CERN in Switzerland, the Birmingham Ensemble for Electroacoustic Research (BEER) presents this performance involving the sonification of data streams from the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most complex particle accelerator. Experimental data containing clues towards possible ‘new physics’ becomes the raw material for improvised music and visualisations programmed in real time by the ensemble with an aim to creating a result that while beautiful, is both musically and scientifically meaningful.

Watch the live performance here.

Presented in partnership with the University of Birmingham’s Arts and Science Festival.

For more information click here for the Art & Science festival brochure.

Geneva, 26 February 2016

The inspiration for the latest art exhibition at the Cité du Temps came from a scientific experiment the height of a six-floor building, built to the precision of the thickness of a human hair. “CMS – The Art of Science”, by Michael Hoch, running from 27 February to 10 April 2016, delivers a dynamic dialogue between art and science. A combination of photography, collage and installations, it pays tribute to the thousands of people who constructed the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva. In the equipment created to explore the secrets of the universe, Michael Hoch, and many visitors, see incredible beauty. He has captured this in the fascinating art displayed in this exhibition and a book of the same title. Fuelled by his belief that the huge experiment constructed for the benefit of mankind should be inclusive and accessible, a series of workshops and round table discussions will be offered to the general public and school groups to prove that this science is “not only for Mr Einstein, but for you and me!”.

“CMS – the Art of Science” features unique photographs of the detector in various stages of construction and maintenance, as well as portraits of many of the individuals responsible for this massive endeavour to find evidence for the Brout-Englert-Higgs mass generation mechanism. This was rewarded by a Nobel Prize in 2013 for the discovery of what is commonly known as the “God Particle”, or more scientifically the “Higgs boson”. Two main themes structure the exhibition’s content. The first is inspired by the symmetry and beauty of the detector, which mirrors that of the early universe through a visual interpretation of matter and anti-matter. The second and complementary series interleaves the remarkable scientific tool with nature, the exquisite subject of its research, provoking philosophical reflection and enquiry. From the black and white images of the experiment’s “creators” welcoming people at the entrance, to a life-size cut out art collage of the equipment and kaleidoscope-style pictures of daisies and poppies sprouting up between the engineering, these exhibits are set to cause a big bang in their own right. All visitors to the exhibition and interactive sessions will leave with the conviction that science is something that they can reach out and touch – visually and intellectually.

This programme at the Cité du Temps is part of Michael Hoch’s art@CMS project, an education and outreach initiative founded in 2012 for the CMS experiment at CERN. Its mission is to act as a springboard for engaging the public in general, and youth in particular, in the excitement of scientific research in High Energy Physics. Through school-based projects and art-science collaborations, art@CMS has been successful in fostering creative synergies between scientists, students, educators and artists from around the world. Exhibitions in Europe and the US have attracted over 100,000 visitors and hundreds of students have participated in the related art workshops.

Michael Hoch was born in Vienna, Austria, where he studied Applied Physics at the University of Technology, and Sports and Physics at the University of Vienna. In parallel he followed lectures at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. During his studies and early work, Michael Hoch’s photography focused on human movement, architecture and the structural forms of nature. He later moved to Geneva to pursue his doctoral studies in Particle Physics at CERN.  His science-art photos have been shown at exhibitions around Europe and in 2010 he produced the 3D film “Inside LHC” that was presented at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. In 2011 and 2012, two of his life-size images of the 20-metre CMS detector were installed at CERN. Since 2012 his artworks have been presented in group and solo exhibitions in many countries in Europe and the US.

 “CMS – The Art of Science” by Michael Hoch will be presented at the Cité du Temps from 27 February to 10 April 2016. Opening hours are from 9am to 6pm and admission is free.

The Pont de la Machine is at the heart of Geneva and has been one of the city’s landmarks since the 1840s. It was originally built to supply water to new public fountains but through the ages has become a symbol of the city’s industrial development. Since 2005 the building has been in the hands of the Swatch Group and houses the Cité du Temps, a unique, interactive venue for permanent and guest exhibitions.

For further information:

Cité du Temps                         contact@citedutemps.com

Mélanie D’Anna                          www.citedutemps.com

Pont de la Machine 1

1204 Geneva

Tel. +41 22 818 39 00

Fax +41 22 818 39 10

Both the artist and a scientist will be present at the exhibition each Thursday from 2.30pm to 5.30pm. Special guided tours, discussions and presentations for school or other groups on particle physics, science and art can be reserved by contacting the artist via  michael.hoch@cern.ch                                                      

Melbourne-based artist Chris Henschke is back in CERN this month to continue his research on CMS data visualisation and sonification in collaboration with Austrian particle physicist Wolfgang Adam.

As part of this work, Henschke will perform a live session at Spoutnik Cinema in Geneva on Friday 26 February at 20:30. Entitled Noise ‘n’ Science, the session will essentially be a ciné-concert that will attempt to stretch the audiovisual boundaries of particle physics research at CMS and CERN.

More info on Henschke’s performance is available here

This Friday, 5 February 2016, the Ettore Fico Museum will be hosting a special event entitled “Dialogues between Science and Art”. Organised by the Turin section of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in collaboration with the CMS experiment at CERN, this will be an educational journey to the boundaries of knowledge by exploring the interconnections between contemporary art and the science of CMS and CERN. The panel will consist of:  Tiziano Camporesi (CMS spokesperson), Amedeo Staiano (director of INFN, Turin), Nicolao Fornengo (professor of theoretical physics at the University of Turin), Michael Hoch (founder of art@CMS) and Luca Pozzi (artist).

Inspired by the CMS detector and in collaboration with art@CMS, Luca Pozzi has created “The Messengers of Gravity”, a series of works  that collectively celebrate the contribution of hundreds of Italian members of the CMS experiment to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Pozzi’s works are part of the exhibition Vanità / Vanitas that is hosted by the Museum until 28 February 2016.

When: 5 February 2016, 18:00 CET

Where: Museo Ettore Fico, Via Francesco Cigna 114, Turin

More information on the event can be found here

From April to June 2015, thirteen 17-year old high-school students of the International School of Geneva (ECOLINT) took part in a science & art project in collaboration with art@CMS. Under the guidance of art educator Stephen Preece and the art@CMS team, the students not only gained understanding of how science and particle physics work at CMS and CERN but they also applied this knowledge creatively and imaginatively to practice by developing original artworks using a variety of media. The artworks were then exhibited in the Centre des Arts of ECOLINT in Geneva on 17 June 2015. But the journey didn’t stop there. Selected artworks are now part of the art@CMS travelling exhibition so that other students from around the world can get inspired and motivated to come up with something new and beautiful!

The video below shows the fruits of their work and documents how the students lived their experience with the science & art project. Enjoy!

Naples becomes the first Italian city that hosts a new art@CMS exhibition from 15 to 20 September 2015. Powered by the CMS experiment at CERN and INFN Napoli, and curated jointly by particle physicists Pierluigi Paolucci (INFN) and Michael Hoch (CMS/CERN) along with architect Maurizio Di Palo, the exhibition is housed in Castel dell’ Ovo, a major tourist but also local attraction that is situated at the heart of Naples.

The exhibition presents more than 30 works by international artists all of which are products of collaborative work with CMS and CERN scientists. In addition, and for the first time, a number of exquisitely Neapolitan contributions will be displayed, like the photographic work “Beam Collisions” by Alessandro Catocci, the “Bing Bang” mosaic by Francesco Paolantoni, and the “Cool Muon Simulacrum” mosaic by Maurizio Di Palo. The interactive audiovisual installation “The Gift of Mass” by INFN, Embrio.Net and Paolo Scoppola will also be on display. Moreover, selected works by ECOLINT high-schoolers resulted from a recent art&science workshop in Geneva will be presented. And last but not least, the inevitable “Higgs Boson Pizza”, especially prepared by a Neapolitan pizza maker will be served at the opening of the exhibition. Special events are also scheduled for September 16th and 17th.

More details about the artworks and the artist-scientist collaborations can be found in the exhibition catalogue here.

Practical information

Where: Sala dell cerceri, Castel dell’ Ovo, Naples, Italy (Google map here)

When: 15-20 September, 09:00 – 19:00

Admission: Free

News articles

Le Scienze

La Repubblica

INFN

When: 24 June – 17 July 2015

Where: CMS P5, Cessy, France

Exhibition Catalogue

Matter: The Fundamental Particles

Peter Çan Bellamy

Xavier Cortada/ Pete Markowitz

Paco Falco/ Pierluigi Paolucci

Alison Gill/ Ian Shipsey

Chris Henschke/ Wolfgang Adam

Michael Hoch

Lindsay Olson/ Don Lincoln

Paul Schuster/ Michael Hoch

ON VIEW  May 2 – 31, 2015

CONVERSATION  Wednesday, May 6 | 6pm

OPENING RECEPTION  Wednesday, May 6 | 7-10pm

For this Art@CMS exhibition, works were selected from artist/scientist collaborations as well as video artists who were invited to create pieces inspired by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. The CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics that sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. CERN is one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research. It operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world where physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter—the fundamental particles—that provide insights into the fundamental laws of nature. CMS is designed to measure the properties of previously discovered particles with unprecedented precision, and be on the lookout for completely new, unpredicted phenomena.

ArtCenter’s Project 924 | 924 Lincoln Road, Second Floor, Miami Beach

“Art and science have long shared a common ground; the ground of boundless inquiry about the nature of our existence”, writes Julia Buntaine, Editor of SciArt in America Magazine. The April ’15 Issue features an article by contributor Megan Guerber, entitled “Symbiosis in Physics and the Humanities: How Fermilab Nurtures Creative Community“. In it, Guerber gives an account on how Fermilab‘s bridges the science and art gap by “bringing together many eclectic cultural events as a means to celebrate both science and community.”

Fermilab’s latest exhibition, “Art@CMS“, is doing exactly this by “celebrat[ing] the awe-inspiring instrument that helped enable the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012: the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.”

Below is an extract from Guerber’s article that can be read in full on the SciArt in America website.

“Art@CMS” has already toured nine countries and been visited by more than 40,000 people. The main attraction is a life-size two-dimensional replica of CERN’s CMS detector that expands throughout the atrium of Wilson Hall. The installation is rendered via photographic banners created by Swiss-born physicist and photographer Michael Hoch, organizer of the exhibition. Eight other professional artists who studied with CMS scientists also have work dis- played in the gallery. Their paintings, sculpture, and mixed-media creations bring a visual understanding of this highly complicated area of study, helping to communicate just some of the wonders of science to new audiences. Fermilab’s first artist in residence, Lindsay Olson, also contributed new work to the current installment of this international show.

The Art@CMS exhibit at Fermilab will run until 22 April. The calendar of Art@CMS events can be found here.

The thousands of particle physicists didn’t plan for their research to be a work of art.

The detector where the once-illusive Higgs Boson, an elementary particle of the universe, was discovered in 2012, however, is now an engineering marvel in the science and art worlds.

Artists and scientists have collaborated in an international exhibit at the facility that works to capture the beauty of science through various media.

The international Art@CMS exhibit opened Wednesday in the Art Gallery at Fermilab.

Launched by physicist and photographer Michael Hoch, the exhibit will be on display in the Fermilab Art Gallery through April 22.The gallery is open 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Georgia Schwender, curator of the Fermilab Art Gallery, said the exhibit connects art and science for the non-physicist. Schwender said until a year ago the art gallery had been restricted by appointment after security-related concerns raised by the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Visitors will see Hoch’s high resolution photographic banners that illustrate the enormity of the detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. The experiment was built in a “cylindrical coil of superconducting cable” that is roughly the size of a five-story building that weighs 14,000 tons.

It was designed to measure subatomic processes produced by collisions of protons capable of taking 40 million pictures per second. It is one of the two particle detectors that enabled the discovery of the Higgs Boson..

The Vienna, Austrian-born physicist-artist’s life-size photographic banners of the detector hang horizontally in the atrium of Wilson Hall, as well.

“There’s an intrinsic geometry that just grabs you,” Hoch said. “There is beauty in science that we want to communicate to a wider group of people, at the same time inspiring them and making them curious to understand more about science.”

Hoch met with Fermilab scientists and the public during Wednesday’s art gallery reception. Fermilab physicist Paul Lebrun said he was impressed with the “great intensity and effort” by the artists in their pieces.

The occasion was an opportunity for the public to meet Fermilab’s first-ever artist-in-residence Lindsay Olson, who explored Fermilab from behind the scenes and created art pieces inspired by the work of scientists at the facility.

Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln, her science advisor, described Olson’s artwork as being “faithful” to the work of scientists.

“I am a very unlikely person to be discussing art and science with you,” Olson told the physicists. “I spent most of my academic career trying to avoid math and science but through a series of fortunate events, I fell in love with science and now science is the foundation of my studio practice and it is an important part of how I view the world.”

Visitors to the exhibit will see five banners by artist Xavier Cortada and physicist Pete Markowitz that show various stages of particle collisions recorded by detectors.

Cortada said the banners are in homage to the more scientists and engineers whose research have opened up new avenues in science.

“Artists try to do the same thing. That is why we are such kindred spirits,” Cortada said.

Fermilab post-doctorate researcher Jim Dolen worked eight years at the detector in Fermilab.

“It is interesting to see the (it) from a different perspective,” Dolen said.

The Art@CMS event runs from February 4 to April 22 and includes workshops and exhibits in the Fermilab Art Gallery and Water Street Studios in Batavia.

The CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland is not only a remarkable scientific instrument; it is also a work of art. It stands 50 feet tall, weighs 14,000 tons, and its thousands of wires and components work in concert to enable it to detect the smallest particles of matter in the tiniest fractions of a second. It is one of the two particle detectors that enabled the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

This magnificent machine is the core of an art and science project that has inspired dozens of other works of art. You will have the chance to see many of those starting next month when the Fermilab Art Gallery hosts the Art@CMS exhibit. First established last year by Michael Hoch, a physicist and photographer at CERN, the Art@CMS collection was created by professional artists working with CMS scientists.

More than 40,000 people have seen this exhibition in nine countries, including two prior installations in the United States. (Roughly 1,000 U.S. scientists contribute to the CMS experiment.)

The collection will be on display in the Fermilab gallery from Feb. 4 through April 22. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

The eight artists featured in the exhibit work in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, collage and digital art. All of them have been inspired by the wonders of science and are excited to communicate those wonders in new ways to new audiences, Hoch said.

“Why am I inspired by the CMS detector? You just have to look at the high-resolution life-size picture of it that will be on display,” Hoch said. “There’s an intrinsic geometry that just grabs you. There is beauty in science that we want to communicate to a wider group of people, at the same time inspiring them and making them curious to understand more about the science.”

The Art@CMS exhibit at Fermilab will begin with a talk by Hoch and other artists on Wednesday, Feb. 4, at 4 p.m., followed by a reception in the art gallery from 5-7 p.m.

But Art@CMS isn’t just an exhibition. Hoch’s aim is to create a dialogue with the public, using art as a medium. To that end, the event will also include a series of workshops for students called Imagining Physics: Art Inspired by Fermilab, to be held at Water Street Studios in Batavia. Over five sessions, local high school students will tour the laboratory, learn about particle physics and be given space and materials to make their own art inspired by what they see.

This workshop will culminate with an exhibit of the students’ work at Water Street Studios from Feb. 25 to March 15. The exhibit will also include work from 10 local artists and will kick off with a reception on Saturday, Feb. 28, from 5-7 p.m. Water Street Studios is located at 160 S. Water St., Batavia, and is open Thursdays through Sundays from noon to 4 p.m.

“Having the Art@CMS pieces here at Fermilab is outstanding,” said Georgia Schwender, curator of the Fermilab Art Gallery. “But having the chance to connect the art and science of the CMS experiment with students outside the laboratory makes this event a true example of our mission.”

The exhibit will include new work from Lindsay Olson, Fermilab’s first artist-in-residence. Olson has spent months exploring Fermilab behind the scenes and has produced more than half a dozen pieces inspired by the work of the laboratory’s scientists. Olson’s art reaches for the same goals as the Art@CMS exhibit as a whole: to use an artistic language to bring science to those who might not otherwise experience it.

The Imagining Physics workshop is full, but every other Art@CMS event is open to the public. The Fermilab Art Gallery in Wilson Hall is open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The exhibit will be open during Fermilab’s Family Open House on Sunday, Feb. 8, from 1-5 p.m.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @FermilabToday .

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov .

CALENDAR OF ART@CMS EVENTS

Wednesday, Feb. 4 – Opening of the Art@CMS exhibit at Fermilab

• 8 a.m. – Exhibit opens
• 4 p.m. – Artists talk in the One West conference room in Wilson Hall
• 5-7 p.m. – Artists reception in the Fermilab Art Gallery

Sunday, Feb. 8 – Family Open House at Fermilab (exhibit open) , 1-5 p.m.

Wednesday, Feb. 25 – Imagining Physics exhibit opens at Water Street Studios, noon.

Saturday, Feb. 28 – Imagining Physics reception at Water Street Studios, 5-7 p.m.

Sunday, March 15 – Final day for Imagining Physics exhibit at Water Street Studios

Wednesday, April 22 – Final day for Art@CMS at Fermilab

The Fermilab Art Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Media Contacts:

• Andre Salles, Fermilab Office of Communication, 630-840-3351, media@fnal.gov
• Georgia Schwender, Fermilab Art Gallery, 630-840-6825, georgia@fnal.gov

Group of Active Citizens from Hackney to showcase their work (art, design, performance and culinary delights) inspired by trip to world famous CERN laboratory.

Aspiring social-change leaders from Shoreditch are part of a special exhibition our conCERN, after the group took a trip to Switzerland to visit CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and to see the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator.

The initiative is a collaborative project between Shoreditch Trust’s Active Citizens programme, the CMS collaboration at CERN, University of the Arts London (UAL), ALLMINDS and recent graduates from the BA (Hons) Fine Art: Print Time-Based Media course at Wimbledon College of Arts (part of UAL).

The project enabled young people from a range of different cultural and social backgrounds to investigate the research possibilities of science and art and relate them to their own interests, while encouraging joint working through shared experiences and collaborative actions so that they can support each other to develop their own practice in positive change as well as building networks with international programmes.

One of the participants and aspiring graphic designer, Land said: ‘‘the trip to CERN was truly an eye-opening one. It was my first time boarding a plane and the view from the plane made me realise how small we really are on this planet and how hard it must be to make an impact in the world. Whilst on the trip I built good friendships with the students and Active Citizens that also came along. The project was very engaging and informative, I was really inspired by the work and the developments that came from CERN. The fact that just a few minds started to develop the concept of sharing information with each other and that this was then released to the general public and is now known as the World Wide Web really fascinated me. I was also inspired by Michael Hoch who works with CERN, simply because of his inventive flair and his ability to leave his fingerprints and creative work at every site, which has encouraged me to take on multiple tasks and develop work that will somehow benefit the general public,’’ he added.

Private View: 6.00-8.00pm Friday 28th November 2014 with performances, drinks and canapés.

our conCERN will be open to the public from Friday 29th November 2014 – 9th January 2015.*

Address:

Waterhouse Restaurant

10 Orsman Road,

London

N1 5QJ

*Please note the Restaurant will be closed from December 24^th 2014 – January 6^th 2015

For more information on the visit check out the our conCERN blog.

Contact Information

Akilah Russell

Communications Officer, Shoreditch Trust

Email: akilah@shoreditchtrust.org.uk

Telephone: (+41)0207 033 0533

Every month, Nature‘s art team selects pictures from the world of science. The eclectic crop for July 2014 includes a picture of Poppy #1, an artwork that is part of The God Particle Hunting Machine series, created by CMS physicist Michael Hoch. Poppy#1 is a picture of poppies interlaced with the CMS detector. The image was one of a number of Hoch’s works on display at this year’s International Conference on High Energy Physics in Valencia, Spain.

Well done, Michael! Well done, CMS!

Nature’s images of the month can be viewed here.

We are happy to announce that today at 2pm our Art@CMS exhibition will be opening in the Callahan Art Center at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. Artworks by Chris Henschke, Michael Hoch and Xavier Cortada will be on display until 31 July.

Come and see the artworks and learn more about CMS, the beauty of science!

Directions to St. Francis College can be found here.

The CMS collaboration is pleased to invite you to participate in the latest event in its Art@CMS vernissage series, featuring works by Paco Falco and Chris Henschke along with Science&Art@School works by students of IPAC Design Genève and Ecole International de Genève. A selection of standard Art@CMS works will also be on display.

The event will take place on June 25th at 17:30 in CERN P5, Cessy, France. Welcome speeches will begin at 18:00. Refreshments will be served. RSVP to art-cms@cern.ch

Naples-based painter Paco Falco (right) teams up with Italian CMS Pierluigi Paolucci (left) to create emotional impressions on canvas about fundamental physics questions and topics addressed by CMS.

In their scientific dialogue, Australian visual Chris Henschke (left) and Austrian CMS physicist Wolfgang Adam (right) are developing an art installation transforming CMS data streams into impressive video sequences which manifest qualities of the sublime present within the LHC experiments.

The Budapest Kovács Gábor Art Foundation and Vienna-based IT consulting and services company Qualysoft have a long tradition in exploring the interconnections between science and art. In a new joint exhibition, entitled “Science / Nature / Innovation”, that was opened today in the gallery UngArt and curated by Noemi Szabó, the works of  16 artists are presented with the aim to give individual answers to the question of the integration of science, new technologies and the laws of physics with art.

CMS physicist and artist Michael Hoch has brought his own reflection on the dialogue between particle physics and art with several works. During the opening event, Hoch gave a presentation on CMS and how the Art@CMS initiative contributes to this dialogue. In addition, Hungarian CMS researchers  Noemi Beni and Zoltan Szillasi offered a virtual tour of the CMS detector to 130 guests live from CERN. “It was a nice surprise when Zoltan and Noemi welcomed the audience in Hungarian directly from the CMS cavern”, says Hoch.

His excellence S.E. Vince Szalay-Borovinczky, Ambassador of Hungary mentioned in his speech that art is too important to leave it just to the artists, as well as science is. Dr. Marton Mehes, director of the Balassi Institute and host of this exhibition, also highlighted the importance of the dialogue between cutting-edge science and modern art, mentioning that this exhibition acts as a fruitful cross-border event. “Following the common roots of art and science, it allows to create an exciting future encounter”, said Mehes.

The other exhibiting artists are:
Balázs Antal, Mario Arbesser, András Dániel, Dieter Ch Deller, György Gáspár, István Haraszty, Veronika Jakatics-Szabó, Béla Kelényi, Rita Koralevics, Viktor Lois, István Orosz, Tamas Szvet, Szilvia Takács, Christoph About Huber, Rita Varga.

The exhibition will be open until 4 April 2014 to visit with free admission. More information can be found here. Photographs of the opening event can be found here.

The interface of art and science was explored by expert speakers and artists including Michael Hoch, founder of the CERN outreach programme, Art@CMS, in a week-long programme at the City of London Boys School in October.

The event, entitled Unseen Dimensions: Dialogues in Art and Science, was conceived as a project to break down the divide between artistic and scientific disciplines and to demonstrate to students that they need not be pigeon-holed in their study choices. Head of science and head of physics, Hugh Jones, said: “Passion and creativity are common themes in science and in art. We wanted to excite the students here with the breadth of cross-curricular thinking and to show them that art and science share similar values, similar themes and similar characteristics.”

The week was launched with a talk on “The new avant-garde” by Prof. Arthur I Miller, emeritus professor of the history and philosophy of science at University College London. Prof. Raymond Oliver, from the University of Northumbria, spoke on “Towards future ways of living (that matter to people)”, and Michael Cook, who researches in computational creativity, gave a talk entitled “My iPad just had a great idea”. There was also a talk on “Matter and material” by Heather Barnett, artist and lecturer in art/science at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Daniel Glaser, director of the Science Gallery at King’s College London, spoke on the question “What is the right space for art and science to collide?”.

The art exhibition was curated by Alison Gill, a sculptural artist and part-time teacher at the school who will present her work at CERN in December. As well as pieces by Hoch and Barnett, the Unseen Dimensions exhibition includes works by Annie Cattrell, Melanie Jackson, Jason Wallis-Johnson and Bill Woodrow, and students at the school.

Preceding the week, Prof. Miller gave a lecture at Gresham College in London on “Creativity in art, creativity in science”, exploring the links between creativity in both fields, and how they had affected each other. He described how Picasso had been influenced by advances in mathematics when creating his Cubist paintings and how Bohr had been interested in Cubist art as a way of trying to visualise some concepts in quantum mechanics.

The information age had given rise to data visualisation art and computer-generated art, he said. Algorithms had been created that could generate music sounding like Bach’s compositions, which many could not distinguish from the real thing, he noted. Miller also described how in 1966, A. Michael Noll had used a computer to generate a picture similar to Piet Mondrian’s painting, Composition with Lines. Shown both pictures, only 28 out of 100 subjects could identify the computer-generated picture, and 59 of the subjects preferred it to Mondrian’s.

Prof. Miller noted that software artist Scott Draves had even gone so far as to say: “I believe that computation can reproduce the whole creative process, and that computers can have soul.” In a question and answer session, Prof. Miller was asked whether a computer could only create patterns or if it could ever have anything to say about the human condition. He said: “Not right now, but I don’t want to say never.” He agreed that he saw scientific and artistic creativity as essentially the same thing, and when pushed, he thought that it was just possible that computers might one day be able to make scientific discoveries.

The Joanneum Universal Museum in Graz is Austria’s oldest publicly accessible museum and the largest general museum in central Europe. In June this year, 200 years after its foundation, I was in this inspiring building with a group of students from two local schools. We were participating in an interdisciplinary workshop to bridge art and the scientific world of particle physics. I am a physicist at CERN/CMS but also an artist who tries to express my scientific work in an artistic manner and I want to inspire the younger generation to get in touch with our fascinating scientific world. In my contact with non-science students, I often sense their reservation regarding scientific topics and a fear of being wrong. By getting them involved in a different way via the language of art, they might discover the many beautiful aspects of the scientific universe.

If we want to have a significant impact in reaching out for new science audiences, we need to use extended communication channels. Art is definitely one that gives us the possibility to invite a larger public to get in touch without making them feel excluded from science because they do not understand it. The big advantage of art is that it is subjective, while science is objective. No one can be told that they are wrong if they try to understand the meaning of an artwork.

So, within the CMS collaboration we have set up Art@CMS as a vehicle for dialogue between scientists, artists and the public and to have a sustainable effect on science communication and inspiration. The aim is to tap into the worldwide network of the CMS collaboration and invite artists from all over the world to get in touch and contribute ideas, concepts and artwork.

However, it is not only about professional artists. In CMS we want to inspire young people to think in a different way and we take their thoughts and ideas seriously. Art, like science, is a serious subject, so the aim was to develop a serious project to bring art and science together at school. In collaboration with the education and outreach groups of both CERN and CMS, together with the Institute for High Energy Physics (HEPHY) in Vienna – the local CMS institute for the event in Graz – we were able to set up the Science&Art@School project within the framework of the PATHWAY European project.

The workshop in Graz was the first of what I hope will be many similar occasions for Science&Art@School. Interdisciplinary in its approach, interactive and flexible in its design and international in its scope, the idea is to promote fruitful dialogue between the arts and the particle-physics community by engaging high-school and university students in the act of creating a work of art, inspired by the big questions that drive scientific work at CMS and CERN. In most school curricula, physics and art are thought of – and taught as – separate subjects. On the other hand, in the Science&Art@School project, as my colleague Angelos Alexopoulos from CERN’s Education and Public Outreach Group says, we believe that particle physicists and artists share fertile common ground in their parallel efforts to explore and understand physis (the Greek word for nature).

The two-day event in Graz brought together 62 high-school students, art and physics teachers from the Graz International Bilingual school and BORG school, along with particle physicists from HEPHY, to exchange insights, ask and answer questions and co-create artworks – their visualizations of fundamental concepts in physics. Three months earlier, in preparation, CMS organized an interactive virtual visit to the experiment for the students – a three-to-four-point online video-conference connection with guides both on the surface and underground. Students could ask questions and direct the guides to see various areas of CMS. The workshop had two parts. On the first day, the researchers gave a CMS masterclass, where the students learned to visualize and analyse real LHC data. They then learned about how artists visualize science and technology. On the second day, four groups of students, assisted by the art educators and scientists, created artworks inspired by particle physics, which were then displayed to the public at the museum.

Science&Art@School is part of the bigger project, Art@CMS, which started in 2012 with a collaboration between the Miami artist Xavier Cortada and physicist Pete Markowitz of Florida International University. Cortada’s artwork In search of the Higgs Boson was shown at CERN during the CMS collaboration week in April 2013. In December, Alison Gill, a sculptural artist from the UK, will present her artwork with “science inspiration partner” Ian Shipsey and in March 2014 it will be the turn of the Italian painter Paco Falco with physicist Pierluigi Paolucci. During the recent open days at CERN, Quantum, a co-production of Collide@CERN and the Forum Meyrin by choreographer Gilles Jobin, was presented at CMS Point 5.

Many scientists see intellectual as well as aesthetic beauty in their research. Now an education project from the CMS collaboration is harnessing artistic beauty to inspire students about the science of particle physics.

CMS physicist and artist Michael Hoch recently launched the Science&Art @ Schoolproject to engage students with stories from particle physics, which he hopes will help them to re-see the natural world in aesthetic as well as scientifically accurate ways. Hoch says that artistic methods can lead students to a deeper understanding of the beauty, value and transformative power of science. “I believe that essential aspects of our research here at CERN can be viewed as beautiful artistic creations,” he says.

The first Science&Art @ School workshop took place in Graz, Austria, from 5-7 June, bringing together 62 students from two high schools nearby: Graz International Bilingual School (GIBS) and BORG.

On the first day, physicists from the Institute for High Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (HEPHY) delivered a CMS Masterclass. Students learned to visualize and analyze real LHC data from the CMS experiment. In the afternoon, students were introduced to the interconnections of science and the arts, and learned how artists visualize science and technology.

The second day was devoted to non-scientific creativity. Four groups of students, assisted by art educators and scientists, created artworks inspired by particle physics. The students documented the workshop with photos, videos and a blog, and displayed their artwork to the public for a day at the Joanneums Viertel Museum in Graz.

“Science&Art @ School rests on three pillars: interdisciplinarity, context and engagement with the aesthetic and intellectual beauty of particle physics,” says Hoch. “Colliding art and science produces something new and beautiful.”

The world was captivated earlier this year when scientists at CERN confirmed the existence of the elusive Higgs boson particle. A half-century of searching by a team of 4,000 scientists could now proclaim to the world that, finally, they had found the subatomic speck often referred to as the “God particle.”

FIU artist Xavier Cortada and physicist Pete Markowitz collaborated on an art installation that will forever mark the historic occasion: five banners at Point Five at the Large Hadron Collider.

Watch an inspiring presentation made by Xavier Cortada and Pete Markowitz at TEDxFIU Talk.

There’s a new splash of color at Point Five, the home of CMS detector on the Large Hadron Collider. Five vivid banners drape the gray walls of the complex, lending the warehouse a cathedral-like atmosphere. Arranged in a line, they pull the viewer’s gaze from panel to panel to land on a true-to-scale photo of the detector itself, magnificently displayed on the back wall.

Art and science are both professions that move humanity forward, says the artist, Xavier Cortada from Florida International University of Architecture. He dreamed up the banner design with help from CMS physicist Pete Markowitz.

“Banners, like flags, mark important events like discoveries of new lands, power and achievement,” says Cortada. “I wanted to include the emblem of [the experiment’s] achievements—the event display.”

Each of Cortada’s five banners artistically interprets a different combination of particles into which theorists predicted the Higgs boson would decay—two photons, two Z bosons, two W bosons, two bottom quarks and two tau leptons.

Incorporating selected pages from every article published by CMS, the banners pay homage to collaboration’s more than 4000 scientists and focus on what Cortada considers to be the CMS experiment’s dual legacy: building upon the work of those who came before and inspiring the generations to follow.