This blog-post sums up Bill Fontana’s last week of his Collide@CERN- Residency.
Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN Artist 2013, Bill Fontana takes a loudspeaker in the LHC tunnel at CERN.
CERN is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world with the biggest man made machine ever built – the Large Hadron Collider. Research is carried out into the unknown to discover fundamental knowledge about the world – the questions which drive scientists to work very hard because they are passionate to find out the answers.
Collide@CERN artist in residency Bill Fontana is no different. Over his first four weeks in residence, he had carried out many experiments in the LHC and came up in the end with the idea of taking a loudspeaker into the LHC and playing the sounds of the LHC 100 meters underground, back to itself. Even the scientists who went down with him in the tunnel, who included Ralph Steinhagen and Robert Keiffer with Subodh Patil were baffled by the echoes and resoundings which happened in the tunnel when the LHC was turned into the world’s largest acoustic instrument. But the questions didnt stop there and many remained unanswered from this last experiment.
This experiment has not only awoken the curiosity of the scientists at CERN, but it has also created a shower of ideas for a bigger piece by Collide@CERN artist Bill Fontana with Subodh Patil and scientists from the CERN community. The experiment with a loudspeaker in the LHC is just the beginning of what Bill Fontana calls “Acoustic Time Travel” which is his ongoing project at CERN. Watch this space to see what happens next year and how far Acoustic Time can really travel!