Week 3 – Collide@CERN Bill Fontana

Collide@CERN Artist Bill Fontana
Bill Fontana in Golden Tunnel, Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN Artist Bill Fontana in LHC Golden Tunnel.
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Watch about Bill Fontana’s third week at the CERN.

We are now at an amazing part of the residency experiment making creative collisions between the arts and science. It has been decided to turn the LHC into a massive musical instrument, playing back the sounds which Bill recorded in February during his induction visit when the LHC was running back to itself.  He wants to bring a loudspeaker like one used at rock concerts into the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider and playing the sounds that he had recorded in February. These were sounds of the magnets propelling the protons from the bottle, which produces a rhythmic pulse every 1.2 seconds. It could be called the heartbeat of the LHC. The recordings were done with accelerometers mounted on the machines holding the magnets to pick up the sounds inside them..


Both Subodh and Bill are tentative and have no idea how this will work. You can tell this by listening to their video log above. However during the week, they also made visits to other parts of the LHC, finding an incredible space like a mighty golden cavern which Bill shouted into with his voice coming back. Bill has plans for that in the future – so watch this space.

But for now he and Subodh are concentrating on  the big day, going down into the LHC, with accelerometers and exciters and seeing how excited the LHC gets when it hears itself when it is running.

Where would this idea take them? We’ll soon find out next week in the next posting for Week 4. This experiment seems to be just the beginning of a much bigger piece that Bill named “Acoustic Time Travel”, and it will be revealed in autumn 2014.