Chris Henschke

Between 2014 and 2024, Henschke collaborated with particle physicists at CERN and found strong resonances between media art and the experimental culture of physics, both of which work through technologies and processes to generate new knowledge. The project began with a disused CRT monitor in CERN’s old linear accelerator hall, near a plaque honouring Niels Bohr, whose philosophy held that quantum phenomena ‘cannot be separated from the apparatus used to observe them.’ Using footage he filmed across CERN over several years, Henschke developed an experimental documentary process in which sonified data from particle accelerators and detectors manipulates the image. The video begins in the macroscopic realm of the massive detector, accompanied by the roar of an accelerator beam ‘plucked’ by physicist Ralph Steinhagen, whose vibrations fall within the range of human hearing. It then unfolds into abstraction, as data-carrying cables melt into fluid forms shaped by the sound of a collision event associated with the Higgs boson, extended in time by physicist Wolfgang Adam. As Adam observed, ‘nature itself is ultimately the source of the sound.’