Chris Henschke.
Strange Weather
University of the Sunshine Coast Art Gallery
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.
About the artists
Chris Henschke is an artist who works with digital and analogue media, sound and light, and experimental science. A key aspect of his practice is cross-disciplinary collaborations, and he has been working with scientists since 1991. He has undertaken a variety of residencies, including an online artist residency at the National Gallery of Australia, 2004; an Asialink residency, 2007; two residencies at the Australian Synchrotron, through the ANAT / Arts Victoria Arts Innovation program, 2007, and an ANAT Synapse residency, 2010; and an ANAT Synapse residency at the CSIRO, 2019.
He has a Doctorate of Philosophy from Monash University (2013-2017), which included on-site work at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland, as part of the ‘art@CMS’ collaboration program. He has since developed a cross-disciplinary PhD program with Arts at CERN.
Recent exhibitions include: ‘Season of the Orchid’, an immersive multichannel soundtrack for Donna Kendrigan’s video installation as part of the ‘Handmade Universe’ exhibition at State Library Victoria, 2022-2023; ‘Song of the Phenomena’ and ‘Demon Core’, installations at DARK MOFO, Hobart, Australia, commissioned by DARK MOFO, 2019; ‘Synthesism’, an in-situ installation at the CSIRO in Clayton, Australia, 2019; ‘How Everything Began’, at the Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria, 2016, opened by Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Peter Higgs and Anton Zeilinger; ‘Circulez’, in-situ at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, Switzerland, 2016.
Credits: Chris Henschke