“When Worlds Collide” by Chris Henschke

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Still from Chris Henschke 'When Worlds Collide' 2018. Two-channel video

Title:

When Worlds Collide

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Exhibiting Artist(s):



• Chris Henschke

Symposium:

• ISEA2024: 29th International Symposium on Electronic Art

Venue(s):

• University of the Sunshine Coast Art Gallery , Sunshine Coast , Australia

Duration:

6 minutes

Artist Statement:

“When Worlds Collide” is a dual-screen montage of documentary footage filmed between the 1950s and 1980s around CERN. Through processes of intuitive and chance based editing I created a 6 minute video from the hours of footage I found myself examining. The montage that emerged from this process raises both questions and possibilities regarding the nature and development of such scientific endeavours.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is a particle accelerator 27 kilometres in circumference, the largest scientific experiment in the world. There are also other accelerators, half-forgotten, buried beneath CERN itself. During my “Art@CMS” residency, in 2018 I made a discovery underneath CERN, not in the tunnels of the Large Hadron Collider or other such accelerators, but in the CERN archives. In half-forgotten mouldering fragments of film and photographs that once won Nobel prizes, I discovered other dimensions to the reductive empirical surface of CERN. Revealed through such ephemera are the trials and tensions of those who first probed the subatomic depths of the universe. This led me to a treasure trove of documentaries showing the development of CERN; its experiments and its experimenters.