CERN, Ars Electronica introduce artist-in-residency program

September 8, 2011 | 2:22 pm

Ars Electronica Center. Image: Nicolas Ferrando, Lois Lammerhuber

Scientists from dozens of countries and cultures mingle at CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider. Last weekend, the laboratory announced plans to introduce a new element into the mix: artists.

CERN and international cyberarts organization Ars Electronica will partner for the next three years to offer one part of CERN’s new multidisciplinary artist-in-residency program, Collide@CERN. They announced Collide@CERN at the ceremony for the Prix Ars Electronica, the Oscars of the digital media arts world, held this year in Brucknerhaus Concert Hall in Linz, Austria.

The digital artist who wins the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN prize will spend two months at CERN developing a project and one month working with the Ars Electronica Futurelab team to realize it. A committee of judges will choose one artist per year for three years.

Each artist will pair with a scientist at CERN. The two will meet every week and will document their experiences in a blog hosted on the Ars Electronica website. Ars Electronica will provide the prize money, while two private individual donors will fund the grant for the residency including travel and subsistence. UNIQA Assurances SA Switzerland will provide insurance.

The program is the brainchild of Ariane Koek, winner of a Clore Fellowship for cultural leadership. Koek, a former BBC producer, was serving as director of The Arvon Foundation for Creative Writing, which runs 140 residencies a year in the UK, when the award from the Clore Leadership Program gave her the chance to develop a new project. She was offered positions in New York, London and Canada, but she turned them down in favor of forging a new path.

Koek said she found inspiration during the course of a bike ride to the British library. She was thinking about what made her stand out from others in the arts. “I said to myself, ‘What makes you weird?’” she said. “I’ve got a really nerdy interest in science.”

She knew CERN was performing cutting-edge research in particle physics. Where better to create a partnership with those doing cutting-edge work in the arts?

“I can’t think of anywhere more exciting on earth to come,” Koek said.

Members of CERN management supported Koek, voting unanimously in favor of her idea to create a new cultural policy at the laboratory. “Science underpins much of modern society and has an influence on the everyday lives of all of us,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “As such, it’s important for scientific organizations like CERN to engage with society on many levels, and for us, Collide@CERN is an important element of that engagement.”

To truly embed the arts program at CERN, Koek organized a board made up of renowned cultural leaders from across the CERN host states: Beatrix Ruf, director of the Kuntsthalle Zurich contemporary art exhibition center; Serge Dorny, director general of the Lyon Opera House; Franck Madlener, director of the IRCAM music institute in Paris. CERN scientist Michael Doser will represent the laboratory, and Christoph Bollman of art fair ArtbyGeneve will represent nearby Geneva. The board members will serve free of charge for three years.

For his part, Doser hopes to translate his experience evaluating scientific proposals to evaluating artistic ones. “Both endeavors [art and science] require a mix of creativity and hard-headedness,” he wrote in an email. “Gently encourage vague thoughts as they first start forming, and then, when they’ve had a chance to gel, subject them to the harsh light of intellect.”

The digital arts section of the Collide@CERN program will accept applications between Sept. 15 and Oct. 31 on the Ars Electronic website. Applicants are asked to submit a personal video testimony, to pitch an idea for a new project, and to turn in a production plan and a portfolio of work. A five-person jury including two representatives from both CERN and Ars Technica and one outside judge will choose the winner in November. That same month the next section of the Collide@CERN program will be announced — this one in dance and performance.

Kathryn Grim

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Physicist tapes together particle data

August 23, 2011 | 8:00 am

Magnetic tape, the transformative medium that made it possible for 1990s teenagers to commit carefully curated pop songs to cassettes and present them like audio billets-doux to their crushes, has long been superannuated by hard drives. Getting a mix from Pandora just isn’t the same.

Selex on exhibit at the Chicago Art Department. Selex is made from 400 data storage tapes from Fermilab’s charmed baryon experiment Selex. It’s part of the exhibit Tape: A Celebration. Image: Chicago Art Department

The difference in sensibility is just as true for physics experiments.

As homage to tape and physics, MIT postdoctoral associate Teppei Katori, who works at Fermilab, created the art piece Selex. Named for a fixed-target charmed baryon experiment that ran in Fermilab’s Tevatron from 1996-97, Selex is part of the exhibit Tape: A Celebration currently showing at the Chicago Art Department in the city’s Pilsen neighborhood.

“It’s the only digital tape piece in the exhibit,” Katori says, noting that the exhibit’s other dozen or so pieces are related to analog tape. “There are no analog tapes in particle physics. I’m a bit biracial.”

In Selex, Katori’s intent is to capture the sharpness and precision needed in science data, creating clean lines and stark contrast using 400 actual data storage tapes from the Selex experiment.

These black, 8-millimeter digital tape cassettes, affixed at their short sides to a white paper background, spell out the word ‘SELEX’. The background is photocopied pages of the 2005 Physical Review Letters paper on Selex’s most highly cited discovery. Suspended from the ceiling by chains, the piece also comprises more tapes lying flat on the floor beneath it, forming a rectangular carpet of cassettes.

In physics experiments today, data tapes are stored in and accessed at remote computing farms. Out of experimenters’ sight, they are also almost always out of mind. But in the bygone era recalled by Selex, tapes were at scientists’ fingertips. Katori’s piece is a nostalgic recollection of that immediacy.

It’s also a nod to early digitization, Katori says. Because the word SELEX is formed from discrete cassettes rather than, say, a continuous unreeled strip, it calls to mind the formation of lettering such as that from a dot matrix. And because these cassettes are jumbo-sized dots, it also recalls the style of a pastime that has come a long way over the decades:

“It’s like the classic video games where the graphics are made of huge dots, like Super Mario Bros.,” Katori says. “It’s like it’s made from a low number of bits.”

The Selex tapes, though, are anything but low-bit. Each small cassette contains 5 gigabytes of data, not too shabby considering how big your average 5-gig drive would have been in 1997. The Selex experiment required 3,000 of them to store its data.

Selex scientists were on the hunt for charmed baryons, particles made of three quarks and including at least one charm quark.

“These things are hard to make and hard to see – they’re heavier than two-quark mesons and you don’t get as many,” says Fermilab’s Peter Cooper, deputy spokesperson for Selex. With more than 120 scientists from 20 institutions in 10 different countries working on Selex, researchers gathered enough information over the two-year lifetime of Selex to describe the mass, lifetime, decay modes and other basic properties of charmed baryons such as _C and _C.

The cover of Physical Review Letters, volume 89, number 11, featured an event that demonstrated the discovery by Selex scientists of the double-charmed baryon.

“There’s a whole list of physics questions associated with the heavy family of the proton and neutron,” Cooper says. Protons and neutrons, themselves baryons, are available in nature. Other baryons have to be made in the laboratory. The Selex finding that made the cover of Physical Review Letters was the discovery of the double-charmed baryon _cc⁺.

“No one had ever seen it before,” he says.

And without tape, particles wouldn’t be seen at all.

With Selex, Katori celebrates an important experiment in particle physics history and the medium that made it and many other science discoveries possible.

As for any concern for the fate of data now enshrined in Selex, it all lives in a more permanent place. For older physics experiments such as Selex, once the data on outmoded storage materials is transferred to modern hardware, the usual life cycle of these materials concludes either at a recycling plant or in a neglected box. For the lives of Selex tapes, it was the latter. The particular tapes for Katori’s work were those that contained backup data, and were in Cooper’s possession when Katori set out to create Selex. As the tapes were the sole property of Selex, it was decided that they be recycled in an artistic matter rather than undergoing the unseemly and less artistic fate of a shredder.

If you’re in the Chicago area, you can visit the Chicago Art Department to view Katori’s Selex and other tributes to tape. View photos of works in the exhibit.

Leah Hesla

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Particle Physics Photowalk Exhibits Open Around the Globe

February 10, 2011 | 1:21 pm

First there was the Photowalk. Next up was the competition. Then came the calendar, and now there are the exhibits.

This image of the 8Pi nuclear-physics experiment at TRIUMF won first place in the global jury competition. The muted black and white image of the 8Pi experiment's inner detectors captures the symmetry of physics. (Photo: Mikey Enriquez)

Starting Feb. 11, photography exhibits will open in Asia, Europe and North America to showcase images from the first Global Particle Physics Photowalk. Exhibits will open on Feb. 11 at CERN in Switzerland, Fermilab in Illinois and KEK in Japan. Photowalk exhibits will also open in Canada at TRIUMF on Feb. 21 and in Germany, organized by DESY, within the next year.

The Photowalk took place on Aug. 7, 2010. More than 200 amateur photographers received special behind-the-scenes access to tour scientific facilities at CERN, DESY, Fermilab, KEK and TRIUMF.  The participating photographers submitted thousands of photos for local and global competitions. Each photowalk exhibit includes the local winners from that particular laboratory’s competition. All five Photowalk exhibits feature the two global winners, Mikey Enriquez’s photograph of the 8Pi experiment at TRIUMF and Hans-Peter Hildebrandt’s photograph of a wire chamber at DESY.

The InterAction Collaboration, whose members represent particle physics laboratories in Asia, North America and Europe, organized the Photowalk. The collaboration plans to host the next Photowalk in 2012.

To find a Photowalk exhibit near you, visit http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1030491

View the press release

Elizabeth Clements

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Playing by ear in the laboratory

January 4, 2011 | 2:29 pm

Richard Dobson sat at his computer in England, listening to a New Age cascade of electronic sounds. He had received the files from Argonne physicist Lily Asquith, with whom he was playing a particle-physics inspired version of Name That Tune. Two files were the calculated sound of Higgs particles, two were quark jets, and two were random sounds. Dobson’s job was to tell Asquith which were which.

“It was a tantalizing exercise,” said Dobson, a musician and programmer with the Composer’s Desktop Project. “The patterns were so interesting; they showed that you could actually hear information and make observations.”

Asquith and Dobson are two of the developers behind LHCsound, a collaboration of physicists and musicians who translate data from the Large Hadron Collider into musical notes through a process called sonification. Their hope is that physicists could use sonified data to supplement traditional visual and numerical data from the machine, possibly picking up events with their ears that their eyes would miss.

The music-matching experiments are helping them develop a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced “gooey”) for their sonification process. The program will allow any experimenter, from a high school student to an LHC lead investigator, to input his own data and create a musical masterpiece.

Although LHCsound started in January 2010, the idea of turning data into audible sound is not new. Dobson gives the example of a Geiger counter, which emits a distinctive blip while detecting radiation, as another audible indicator of changing data.

“The human ear is good at detecting subtle changes in sound,” he said. “It’s a survival instinct: a new sound turns up, our attention is drawn to it.”

The GUI is an extension of the original project where sounds are linked to variables in the data such as type of particle, velocity or energy. Users will be able to upload their data as a list of numbers and make music by adjusting parameters such as instrument, tempo and pitch. For instance, a user might choose to map a violin with a particle’s energy, creating an arpeggio as the energy rises and falls throughout the event.

“What physicists are doing is like a treasure hunt or a detective story, and this could help them skim their data,” Dobson said. “The mere idea that you can listen to collisions could be another tool in their armory.”

Any experiment with a column of changing numbers can be sonified, even something as simple as a wooden car’s acceleration as it rolls down a ramp. The LHCsound crew received a grant from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to develop and present a workshop at middle schools in the U.K. so that students can sonify their own physics projects. Asquith said she would love to bring the outreach component to the U.S. as well.

“The teachers we’ve talked to have wonderful ideas for projects in their physics classrooms,” Asquith said. “The main benefit is that the kids are so excited about it.”
To develop sonification as a useable technology, Asquith said she needs more physicists involved in the project. “So far I’m the only one,” she said. “We need to find a proof-of-principle that we could use our ears to distinguish types of events. It’s potentially a large research project.”

In the meantime, the ideas from musicians, artists, educators and others keep coming as fast as particle collisions in the LHC.

“We’re getting more people interested all the time,” Asquith said. “I’ve permanently got a list of people who want me to do some work for them.”

Among the proposed projects: a dance choreographed to the sounds, a composition that could be performed on an actual instrument, and a real-time sonic display for ATLAS that would play the events as they happen in the collider.

“It all has the potential to become very exciting,” Asquith said.

– Sara Reardon

Symmetry Intern

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Global Particle Physics Photowalk calendar available for download

December 17, 2010 | 12:48 pm

This year, five laboratories in four countries invited more than 200 photographers to tour their grounds and translate the work of science into works of art. A calendar featuring the 15 winning images from the Global Particle Physics Photowalk is now available for free download.

Download the calendar and printing instructions here. If you would like to have the calendar printed professionally, check with businesses that print photographs.

See the winning photos from DESY, Fermilab, SLAC, TRIUMF and KEK at InterActions.org or read more in symmetry breaking about the winning photographers.

Kathryn Grim

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A new record for ATLAS

December 6, 2010 | 8:30 am

A few of the ATLAS musicians appearing in the first CD, which features blues, rock and heavy metal.

The ATLAS experiment at CERN has a new record – but this time note for proton collisions recorded or numbers of exotic particles produced. Instead, today marks the debut of the collaboration’s first music album, featuring several dozen physicists, engineers and technicians playing everything from heavy metal to classical piano.

Resonance: Music from the ATLAS experiment goes on sale today and can be purchased via iTunes. All proceeds will benefit the Happy Children’s Home, a charity founded by former CERN employee Mette Stuwe.

The album has been in the works for more than two years, with 26 ATLAS scientist-musicians, along with 42 of their bandmates, collaborators and fellow musicians, recording the thirty-six tracks in their spare time. The idea for the album was born in October 2008 during a party celebrating the successful completion of the massive ATLAS detector, where the musical entertainment included several bands that counted ATLAS collaborators as members.

Some of the ATLAS collaboration's classical musicians, featured on the second CD.

The final two-CD set includes some tracks by the bands that played in that 2008 celebration but isn’t limited to rock. In a reflection of the diversity of the collaboration’s 3,000 members, the album includes a range of musical styles, from blues and jazz to classical and celtic harp.

But while the CD might show another side of particle physicists, they by no means ignore the subject they spend their days (and often nights) devoted to.  Several tracks feature original songs with physics themes, including The ATLAS Boogie and “Points of Order”, a lament about the LHC’s multitude of meetings.

Rounding out the album’s eclectic offerings is a DVD that features the famous LHC rap, a time-lapse video of the ATLAS detector’s construction, a “making of Resonance” video and an interview with the founders of the Happy Children’s Home.

More information, clips and video available at the Resonance website.

Katie Yurkewicz

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Holy hologram!

December 1, 2010 | 9:30 am

In response to our article about the holographic universe and physicist Craig Hogan’s proposed holometer experiment at Fermilab, we received a letter and poem from Harley White, who lives in Granada, Spain. She wrote:

Hello,

After reading some articles about the holographic noise experiments, I was spurred to write a poem. Although my knowledge of physics is miniscule (perhaps a little less so than that famed Planck unit), my inspiration was astronomical enough to cause the following composition.

Warm regards and good luck!
Harley White

Holy Hologram!

Say we dwell
In a 3-D projection
That truly is 2-D
Though hidden by scale,

String-theoried along
In our quantized vale
Where time dances quaintly
O’er space hill and dale,

Then reality isn’t
At all as it seems
But more like the visions
Segueing in dreams—

Weird warped, yet truth fabricked
Such stuff conjectures are made on
A universe still in conception
Oho hologram!—

While headlong we lumber
Mistake wake and slumber
Spin webs from thin air
Sing ho for the life…

Hogan appreciated the poem, which we forwarded to him. Responding by e-mail, he commented, “What’s nice about this is that the poet seems truly inspired by the poetry of the physics itself.”

Kurt Riesselmann

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Photographer crosses globe to capture art of high-energy physics

November 1, 2010 | 9:00 am

Cockroft Walton, KEK, Ibariki, Japan, 2008

From ATLAS to Antarctica, photographer Stanley Greenberg has travelled the world in a high-energy treasure hunt for the shapes of physics. In a book of photographs to be published next year, Greenberg will show the results of his five-year photography tour of detectors and accelerators across the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Argentina, Japan and Antarctica.

The book’s title, “Time Machines,” refers to the experiments’ efforts to recreate the period just after the big bang. Yet the photos themselves create something of a time warp effect: the most high-tech equipment in the world shot on black and white film.

Greenberg, who has already published two photography books on New York City’s infrastructure and architecture under construction around the country, was impressed by the structural forms and large spaces that comprise detectors.

“It’s an extra feature that there’s all this incredible research going on,” he said.

A self-described science nerd, Greenberg became interested in the LHC when it was under construction in 2005 and contacted a Columbia University physicist to ask about photographing it. She put him in touch with some of her colleagues at CERN and from other laboratories, all of whom were happy to open their doors to Greenberg. Grants from the Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation allowed him to travel wherever he wanted among the world’s high-energy physics experiments.

“I started to live and breathe physics for a while,” Greenberg said. “When it quickly becomes an obsession, you know that you’re going to stick with it.”

His network quickly expanded as each physicist referred him to friends at other collaborations. Eventually, physicists he’d never even heard of emailed him, asking when he was coming to photograph their experiments. Their openness, he said, was a “welcome change” from his previous projects photographing NYC’s underground where getting access to the structures was difficult, if not impossible.

The teamwork that exists in high-energy physics collaborations, Greenberg said, was one of the most interesting things about the project.

“It’s such a perfect model for so many other things,” he said. “People from 15 different countries can work on one project and get along.”

Their hospitality allowed him many unique views for his shots and experiences such as climbing around inside the LHC’s ATLAS and ALICE experiments while they were still under construction.

“Even getting to some of these places was amazing,” he said. “At SNOLAB, first you’re dressed like a miner, then you’re dressed like a lab technician, then you get dropped a few hundred feet by a rope. It’s not the kind of thing you forget too quickly.”

Nor was the richness of the assortment of remote locales lost on Greenberg.

“I like to go to places where you’re the only one that’s there,” he said. “I’ve been to the bottom of a mine, inside a mountain, to the edge of the world.”

To learn more about “Time Machines” and view Greenberg’s previous work, visit www.stanleygreenberg.net.

To see more photos from “Time Machines,” click on the thumbnail images below.

MiniBooNe Horn, Fermilab, Illinois, 2006. Click to see full-size image.	CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer, Jefferson National Laboratory, Virginia, 2008	Cockroft Walton, J-PARC, Ibariki, Japan, 2008
SNO, SNOLab, Ontario, 2009	ICECUBE Drilling Station, Antarctica, 2009

– Sara Reardon

Symmetry Intern

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DESY and TRIUMF take home top prizes from the first Global Particle Physics Photowalk

October 14, 2010 | 9:15 am

Mikey Enriquez's photograph of the 8Pi nuclear-physics experiment won first place in the global jury competition and third place in TRIUMF's local competition.

This release was issued October 14, 2010 by the InterAction Collaboration.

A sunburst image of a particle detector at Germany’s DESY laboratory and a black-and-white photograph of a nuclear-physics experiment at TRIUMF in Canada have won the top prizes in the first-ever Global Particle Physics Photowalk.

More than 100 of the top photographs from the photowalk, including the six winners of the jury and “people’s choice” competitions, are now viewable on Flickr.

“As scientists, we’re excited by our work and our laboratory environment. What was amazing about this event was the opportunity to share that experience with the people who support and benefit from the research we do,” said Nigel S. Lockyer, director of TRIUMF. “Bringing it full circle to see what caught their eye and got their attention was the real treat. Art and science have serious parallels; we all struggle to look at things in new ways to generate new insights about what is really going on in our world.”

On August 7, more than 200 photographers had the opportunity to present a new view of physics by going behind the scenes at five laboratories in Asia, Europe and North America as part of the Particle Physics Photowalk. Following the event, photographers submitted thousands of images to local competitions at the participating laboratories, which included DESY, TRIUMF, CERN in Switzerland, Fermilab in Illinois, and KEK in Japan. Each laboratory selected their local winners, and forwarded the top three to compete in two global competitions organized by the laboratories in the spirit of friendly competition.

Hans-Peter Hildebrandt's image of portrait of a wire chamber at DESY won first place in the people's choice global competition, second place in the global jury competition, and first place in DESY's local competition.

More than 1,300 photography enthusiasts voted online to name the people’s choice winners. Hans-Peter Hildebrandt’s photograph of a wire chamber at DESY garnered the most votes, followed closely by Tony Reynes’ image of an accelerator operator on shift at Fermilab, and Matthias Teschke’s photograph of the HERA accelerator tunnel at DESY.

“I am an amateur nature photographer and the subject—technology—was a great challenge,” said Hans-Peter Hildebrandt, a lead technician at a German manufacturer. “You don’t get to see things like accelerators in tunnels very often, and I am really glad I took part in the photowalk. I spent a long time on the winning photo, took a series of 24 shots from different angles, positions and with different camera settings.”

A panel of international judges also selected three winners. The judges—photographers Stanley Greenberg from the US and Simon Norfolk from the UK, and accelerator physics student and sculptor Meghan McAteer—gave the top prize to Mikey Enriquez’ photograph of the 8Pi experiment at TRIUMF, second prize to Hildebrandt’s wire-chamber photograph, and third prize to the “kissing lips”, a photograph of a pair of quadrupole magnets at the DESY laboratory taken by Heiko Roemisch.

“I saw a link for the Particle Physics Photowalk on someone’s Facebook wall, and the chance to walk around and see an actual particle physics lab up and close and with the sole purpose of taking photographs of it was hard not to take,” said 22-year-old Enriquez, a recent graduate of the photo-imaging program at Vancouver’s Langara College.

The winning photographs will be featured in the December issues of the particle physics publications the CERN Courier and symmetry. All five participating laboratories will also feature the global winners and their local photowalk selections in temporary exhibits in 2011.

“I think I can speak for all of DESY when I say that we are overwhelmed and proud that a total of three pictures taken during the photowalk at DESY won a total of four places,” said Prof. Dr. Helmut Dosch, Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors. “We always knew that our workplace is attractive, but it’s nice to see proof of this in both the jury and the public vote. We’re also especially proud that the world’s particle physics labs took to the suggestion of a global photowalk so enthusiastically and that all labs had such an amazing harvest of fascinating pictures.”

The Particle Physics Photowalk was organized by the InterAction collaboration, whose members represent particle physics laboratories in Asia, North America and Europe.

Press Release

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Artist completes ATLAS mural, samples surreal CERN life

October 6, 2010 | 10:00 am

The ATLAS mural is only one-third the size of the detector it represents. Image courtesy of CERN.

Over the course of three months this summer, a gray, boxy service building at CERN gradually transformed into a three-story work of art.

American artist Josef Krisotofoletti used a cherry-picker lift and a collection of vibrant paints to turn the building’s rectangular face and side into a three-dimensional mural representing ATLAS, the largest detector at the Large Hadron Collider. In the process, he experienced some of the strange and wonderful quirks of life at CERN.

The ATLAS collaboration officially unveiled the mural today.

Kristofoletti, 28, has over the past several years built up a portfolio of larger-than-life works using the interior or exterior walls of buildings as a canvas. In contrast, the ATLAS mural measures only about a third of the size of the actual machine it depicts. The 7,000-ton detector sits 100 meters, or about 330 feet, below the mural in a cavern underground, where it captures data from collisions between the highest energy proton beams humankind has ever sent spinning around a particle accelerator.

The artist said that the idea to create the mural came to him in his sleep after he saw pictures of the ATLAS detector online.

“I remember having a dream about being inside the detector as the collisions were happening,” he said. “Everything was brightly colored and geometric, like a multifaceted crystal.”

He painted his first ATLAS mural on the wall of the Redux Contemporary Art Center in South Carolina. His work attracted the attention of ATLAS communicator Claudia Marcelloni, who invited him to visit in 2009. Less than a year later, he was working on his new ATLAS mural within view of Mont Blanc and living near the French-Swiss border in a rented apartment.

“It was clean, and there was a small kitchen where I mostly ate some of the 300 types of cheeses they have in France,” he said.

Kristofoletti gets ready to add color. Image courtesy of Josef Kristofoletti.

ATLAS provided the walls, the materials and the training he needed to work at the laboratory. A private donor covered Kristofoletti’s travel and living expenses.

During his time at CERN, the artist was thrilled to see his childhood hero, Stephen Hawking, give a lecture on the origin of the universe. He also met a cast of characters that could have come straight from one of his paintings.

“There was a man who always wore a cape,” he said. “And I met a couple, man and woman, who were both way over 7 feet tall. I thought of them as the giant lovers.”

He met a man who could not remember faces, even his mother’s, but could visualize complex hardware from any angle in his mind.

“I asked him one day to come by and look at the mural,” Kristofoletti said. “After staring at it for a while, he said, ‘This means nothing to me.’”

But Kristofoletti received plenty of encouragement. He said that as he was working hoisted on the lift, passers-by would shout, “Good work!” or give him a thumbs up.

Perhaps most energizing were his more in-depth talks with the scientists.

“I had some great, actually some pretty unforgettable conversations in the cafeteria with some of the physicists,” he said. “It was great to see the excitement of people who have been working on this experiment for years, and now they are perhaps on the verge of some huge payoff.”

Kristofoletti said he thinks the ATLAS mural is just the beginning of his work translating particle acceleration into art. “I am already working on a few new techniques and ways that events could be shown for other physics-related murals,” he said.

His other current project involves acceleration in a different form. He is designing a mural for Formula 1 racing that is meant to be viewed at 200 miles per hour.

Kathryn Grim

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