As part of his residency, Julius is making interventions at the CERN laboratory. The first intervention took place in one of the hidden spaces at CERN where no one ever goes: the underground tunnels which have housed the archives of the organisation since 1954.
22 physcists were led in complete darkness through the winding tunnels to another small, enclosed space which they had never seen before. They were placed in different positions in the room, being warned that other people could be in there too – their only sense of the space and who might be there being generated when they spoke. Unable to see, deprived of their visual sense, they were asked to describe what they saw in this dark-space, after they had listened to an old recording of Bertrand Russell discussing Plato and his save of representation.
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What happened after this?
Was everyone just left in the void?
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There were two further interventions after this. Intervention 3 – Julius did a recreation of his art school training in 90 minutes – a deliberately ironic act but with a very serious purpose too. To give scientists a glimmer of what art school training is, particularly how ideas for arts projects are formed and judged. The intervention was in 3 parts. Part 1 – Flash art history – 200 pictures very quickly showing the history of art with Julius’s commentary. Part 2 – Space Exercise – the physcists had to go outside and do a walking meditation, thinking of an arts project they wished to pitch. They had to set off on the angled trajectory of their choice, walking always in a straight line, then bouncing off any obstruction they encountered at the same angle. Part 3 – Arts Pitch – they pitched their arts ideas, with Julius pressing them on their ideas.
The final intervention was done in the week leading up to the discovery of the new Higgs-like particle at CERN. The tree in the courtyard of restaurant 1 at CERN, was rigged up with mikes in its branches. So it became a listening tree, under which Julius sat, monitoring the sounds for 6 hours as Higgsteria mounted. Watch this space – because this piece will be appearing somewhere soon…