Years ago I met in Venice a woman from the art department at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. We met outside the Giardini, while we were in a queue to enter the Biennale and we engaged in a conversation spanning creative arts, fashion, and science. It intrigued me to later discover that some of the names I mentioned to her ended up visiting CERN and drawing inspiration from its projects, experiments and researches.
Over the years, CERN has collaborated with artists, launching residency projects like Collide, Arts at CERN's international residency award, established in 2012.
This initiative offers artists working at the intersections of art, science, and technology the chance to immerse themselves in CERN's environment and engage with its scientific community. Parallel projects, including Collide Copenhagen, a three-year collaboration between CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary, were also developed. This framework supports artistic research in art, science, and technology, hosting a residency annually from 2023 to 2025.
In April this year, following an international open call with Copenhagen Contemporary, Arts at CERN announced Alice Bucknell as the recipient of the second Collide Copenhagen residency award. Bucknell, a North American artist and writer based in Los Angeles, explores architecture, ecology, magic, and nonhuman and machine intelligence using game engines and speculative fiction.
Their work explores the limits of scientific knowledge, systems thinking, and the dimensions of video games: recent projects focused indeed on cinematic universes within game worlds employed as interfaces for understanding complex systems, and forms of knowledge.
For example, Bucknell's "The Martian Word for World is Mother" (2022) - devised in collaboration with space lawyers, planetary habitability astronomers, drone pilots, and AI linguists and with a script co-written with the Language AI GPT-3 - is an exploration of three Martian worlds overseen by a billionaire tech despot, a multinational conglomerate and an alien ecosystem.
Bucknell's proposal "Small Void" will be developed during a two-month residency split between CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary. Inspired by CERN's particle physics research and Earth's ecosystems, the project explores the relationships between life and intelligence at the micro-scale through game worlds.
At CERN, Bucknell will collaborate with scientists to artistically explore microscopic black holes and imagine and transform them within the game, drawing from CERN's experiments.
In Copenhagen, focus will shift to Earth-bound life forms, particularly resilient ecosystems like the lichen at Assistens Cemetery. By integrating these elements as narrative agents, Bucknell aims to spark a dialogue about microcosmic intelligence and life.
While arts residencies have flourished and even a dance and opera film was shot at CERN, no such opportunities have been developed for fashion students or designers, even though in previous years CERN established a connection with designers interested in science.
Dutch Designer Iris van Herpen was invited to learn more about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during her visit at CERN, while Coperni's Pre-Fall 24 collection drew inspiration from science and technology, and was accompanied by a photoshoot organized at CERN.
Hopefully, the possibility of a fashion residency at CERN (or in other scientific laboratories like the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS) in Italy) will also emerge in future. In the meantime, who knows which fashion house/brand will organize the first ever runway show in a scientific institution.
Following their penchant for using iconic architectural marvels as backdrops, the notion of a runway set amidst a scientific laboratory appears to be the next logical progression. One can easily imagine a spectacle orchestrated by Louis Vuitton under Nicolas Ghesquière's creative helm, given the brand's financial resources and influence, and Ghesquière's genuine interest in science and the future.
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