Bill Fontana

CERN Artist in Residency

2013

During the CERN Artist in Residency program, Fontana was matched with his CERN scientific partner, cosmologist and former Marie Curie Intra European Fellow, Subodh Patil.

Fontana decided to focus his project on the Large Hadron Collider (pictured above). The LHC is the world's largest and most powerful particle collider, the most complex experimental facility ever built, and the largest single machine in the world (pictured above).

Acoustical Time Travel is a project that in which Fontana broadcasted the recording of the proton-source beat in the LHC through various structures around CERN and within the LHC tunnel to discover how different materials affect the sound.

Over his first four weeks in residence, Fontana carried out many experiments in the LHC and came up with the idea of taking a loudspeaker into the LHC and playing the sounds of the LHC 100 meters underground, back to itself. The echoes and resoundings which happened in the tunnel turned the LHC into the world’s largest acoustic instrument.