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CERN
Flusser
Lord's Bridge
Lightning Field

CERN, view from the water tower, 2000
[Photograph | Tim O'Riley]

Current CERN-related work centres around Twenty-Seven Kilometres, an artist’s book that is published and distributed by Revolver, Berlin in Autumn 2013.

It is based on my experience of looking at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva. CERN is a vast project whose centrepiece, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is a circular particle accelerator installed 175 metres beneath the land between the Alps and the Jura mountains. Predominantly based around photographs taken in 2008 as final work was taking place on the LHC before it was switched on for the first time later that year, Twenty-Seven Kilometres also features a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in addition to my own text.

Perhaps given the scales involved, the book reflects on scientific endeavour in a broad sense, mulling over how the immensity of nature is squared with more everyday concerns, and exploring the human dimension to science and its status as both an ideal realm and a tangible practice.

Perhaps above all, the book looks for those transient, poignant and often-humorous responses that people have to the “machine” and its make up.