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During our three months residency at CERN we took time to explore every nook of the vast site, we learnt so much about the history of CERN this way and connected with people we wouldn’t have ordinarily crossed paths with. There’s a tower we sneaked into to get a good view of part of the main campus.

Luis Alvarez Gaume is a theorist and was our scientific partner. We had our weekly therapy sessions with him where he would turn the physical laws of the universe, as we knew them, on their head and constantly pull the rug from under our feet. He kept us on our toes, and you can hear him dissecting science and scales of human experience in our work The View from Nowhere.

John Ellis guided us on our explorations into theories around The Standard Model. He was kind and generous allowing us to fumble our way around the complex world they inhabit. He too is in the View from Nowhere

We asked to have a tour of the workshop. They’re creating prototype parts for various experiments employing incredible skill and time-consuming processes to nudge and force metal into various forms and structures. It became clear that at CERN they are pushing the envelope at every level, operating at the limits of human endeavours, both technologically and empirically. Here we are at the workshop where they learnt to ignore us over the couple of weeks we filmed in there.

In building 180 we bore witness to the sheer scale CERN is working at, these limits of human endeavour, what surprised us was how the language of theory, essentially mathematics came to be the creative, malleable and playful language whereas the real world materials of technology were hard and fixed and difficult to move and control. We played with this contrast in our moving image work The View from Nowhere.

Hanging out in the theory department we couldn’t aim to understand their discussions but tried to absorb their methods, interactions, languages and endeavours.

 

Anita Hollier welcomed our request to visit the archive and have a poke around.

The archive holds collections of past scientists’ physical notebooks and paperwork.

In the archive we went looking for evidence of the human signature in the capturing process.

This is an ATLAS data image in Root. Beginnings of thinking about ATLAS data and how we might be able to work with it / access it / in what way we would work with it of thinking about HALO.

 

As a result of our residency we were given the opportunity to propose a large-scale idea for Audemars Piguet Commission at Art Basel.

 

Arts at CERN: https://arts.cern
CERN: https://home.cern
ATLAS experiment: https://atlas.cern
Experimental Particle Physics Research Group, University of Sussex: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/epp/research/aod

We had spotted the materials processing lab on the Mineral Science Laboratories website and were keen to try and spend some time there, meeting scientists and researching and observing how they create an understanding of the physical origins of earthly matter. We applied to SARF (Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship) and then had to convince the scientists they should welcome artists into the lab.

The scientists in the mineral science laboratory had a vote on whether to invite artists in, after a few months of us being there we were invited to be in the 100 years photo, as we “had earned the right to be there”.

 

We were in the lab every day, getting to know the people, collections, and their wider networks. A major subject of Bill Melson’s research was dedicated to listening to Arenal volcanoe, developing a vocabulary to document the sounds a volcano makes and see if it can help predict eruptions. He has a fascinating written and audio archive observing Arenal volcano in Costa Rica, we helped him to digitise some of his reel-to-reel audio recordings which also feature in Worlds in the Making.

Jeff Post has a deep understanding of the structure of mineral crystals and how and why they form the way they do. You can hear him describing these processes in our work Where Shapes Come From.

There were several people who took us under their wing, one of them was volcanologist Rick Wunderman. His door was always open to us and like several others his kindness and generosity extended beyond the lab and our research endeavors.

On residencies and fieldwork trips we always keep a daily log of research and activities…”Asked Dick if he would read out some of his research notes, he said yeah!”

Sorena Sorenson let us lose on her Cathode Luminescence Imager. We spent many a evening locked in the lab creating time lapse animations of glowing mineral crystals.

 

In the special books library with scientist Roy Clarke. He taught us about the Widmannstatten structure within meteorites.

We had free reign to explore the rock collection.

 

Volcano film archive waiting to be transferred. Scientists have been depositing their 16 mm films taken of volcanoes with the Smithsonian since the 1920’s! We helped advise on transferring them and they feature in our work Volcano Observatory.

We had been patiently waiting for a meteor to be sliced so we could film the process, the time had arrived!

We worked our way round the laboratory meeting all the scientists.

We spent many hours filming Dick Fiske processing his lava samples from Hawaii, for our work Worlds in the Making.

 

 

 

 

 

Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship: https://www.si.edu/sarf
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History: https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/mineral-sciences
Smithsonian Mineral Sciences Research: https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/mineral-sciences/research
Smithsonian Institution: https://www.si.edu

In 2010 we went to the Galapagos Islands and mainland Ecuador as part of the Gulbenkian Galapagos Artist residency. We were developing an artwork which explores how humans observe, document and create an understanding of the origins of the physical world around us and we had been looking for an opportunity to visit volcanic landscapes and observe volcanologists, we were lucky to be offered this residency along with a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Mineral Sciences Laboratory in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History later the same year. This research, explorations and filming became our artwork Worlds in the Making.

 

The residency involved spending 7 days on a boat with a Galapagos natural history guide, who took us to many of the Galapagos Islands to learn about the landscapes, animals, history of and environmental approach to the Galapagos Archipelago.

 

 

 

We stayed in Isla Isabela for a week and trekked up to volcanic landscapes at Volcan Chico and to the old Sulphur Mines, to film them.

Filming at the old sulphur mines on Volcan Azufre, which appears in our work Worlds in the Making. Volcanologist Dick Fiske from the Mineral Sciences Lab can also be heard reading a description of a scientists exploration to, and study of, the sulphur mines at Volcan Azufre, which we found in the Charles Darwin Research Station Library (see below).

The library was a fascinating resource, every scientist who came to study on the Galapagos Islands were obliged to donate the scientific papers from their research conducted there.

 

We spent a week at the Charles Darwin Research station on the Island of Santa Cruz. Visiting scientists stay here to carry out studies into wide ranging subjects from invasive marine species to the restoration of ecosystems.

 

We spent a day with Jorge and his team, filming his processes of collecting data on the invasive blackberry. This became our work Indefatigable.

Back on mainland Ecuador we had arranged to meet volcanologists at the University of Quito.

At the University of Quito we learned about one of the sites we would visit, the Volcano Observatory in Banos where they observe the active Volcano Tungurahua, you can see a drawing of it in this image.

They use a mix of digital and analogue methods to study Tungurahua including this make shift technique for estimating the height of the volcanic plume in kilometres.

 

The scientist’s hand-make carbon paper for their seismographs, they taught us how to do it. They like using paper seismographs as they can hear when the needle frantically scratches the paper alerting them to an eruption.

During our time in Banos we spent a few nights in this hut, opposite the volcano, the clouds rarely cleared for any decent filming but the whole building would shake with the boom of eruptions.

During our couple of weeks in Banos, the host where we were staying decided to organise a screening of our artworks at the only place in town which owned a projector. It was an incredible experience, a mixture of locals of all ages and tourists including some teenagers from a local village who would attend a computer club on a Saturday morning to access digital tools for making work. We talked about the works in English, someone would translate into Spanish and there would be all sorts of questions flying around, we remember it as a highly charged excitable affair, we hope we inspired.

 

The University of Quito also sent us on trip with their engineers for a few days, who were mending one of the seismic stations. We were under falling ash and the camera lens became crunchy.

We visited Cotopaxi, the world’s highest active volcano. You must climatise to the height before attempting to climb it. We made it to the snow line. Others we were staying with made an overnight trek to the top which sounded pretty harrowing, it was incredibly windy.

 

 

 

Galapagos Residency Publication: https://gulbenkian.pt/uk-branch/publication/galapagos/
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation: https://gulbenkian.pt/uk-branch/
Article on Semiconductor’s Galapagos residency: https://gulbenkian.pt/uk-branch/gulbenkian-galapagos-artists-residency/
Galapagos Conservation Trust: https://galapagosconservation.org.uk

In 2005 we were awarded the ACE international fellowship to spend 5 months at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, California, USA. We ended up spending six months there initially, as there was so much to do, and we were thoroughly immersed. We went back in 2006 to interview and photograph for our moving image work Magnetic Movie. Returning in 2014 to say hi.

Forest Mozer (above) took us under his wing after we gave a presentation to him and his colleagues, a room full of rocket scientists! He gave us tours of the laboratory and introduced us to his fellow scientists who worked across the field of planetary, solar and interplanetary magnetic fields. This sowed the seed for our journey and the research route we would take.

SSL was our first residency in a science laboratory. We were in the lab everyday exploring, researching and interviewing. Space scientists take actual measurements from satellites which they design, build, capture data from and analyse. They do all of this at SSL and we started to gain an insight into how in science all the different roles from experimenters to theorists to engineers come together to realise one goal. Here they are working on one of the five satellites that make up THEMIS.

Solar physicist Janet Luhmann challenged us to question science as a human invention and as a result she inspired us to ask more philosophical questions of science, which filters through all of our work today. In Magnetic Movie she talks about hairy balls and sausages on the Sun.

We went to Wilcox Solar Observatory at Stanford University, and learnt about how they have been collecting daily observations of the Sun’s global magnetic field since 1975 with the goal of understanding changes in the Sun and how those changes affect the Earth.

The top image above shows David Brain’s images of magnetic fields on Mars. They were made using actual data collected by a magnetometer orbiting Mars. Scientists can learn about magnetic fields on Mars and their anomalies. This visual language, where the fields are represented using colour coded lines, inspired the beginnings of Magnetic Movie. You can hear David Brain in Magnetic Movie talking about what it would look like if you could see Mars’s magnetic fields.

Ruth’s desk at SSL (above) the colourful tabs are playing with the visual language scientists have developed to convey information about magnetic fields. These experiments led on to what became Magnetic Movie.

Stephen Mende would talk to us about the Aurora Borealis. That is his thing, and he describes it in Magnetic Movie. There’s a great picture of him in a book called Majestic Lights, as a student huddled up in the red cabin you can see in a photo on his desk, collecting data.

After seeing an unusual image of the Sun on a scientists wall and a bit of research post doc researchers Iain Hannah and Stephen Christie taught us how to access archives and download scientific images of the Sun, taken by satellites and ground based observatories, in differing wavelengths. The beginnings of Brilliant Noise was born.

During our time at SSL, they sent us off to other NASA ‘bases’ we visited NASA Ames and NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre.

 

Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory: https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/research-unit/space-sciences-laboratory
The wilcox solar observatory: http://wso.stanford.edu
NASA Ames Research Centre: https://www.nasa.gov/ames
NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre: https://www.nasa.gov/goddard