THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERESBrighton-based artist duo Semiconductor (aka Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) explain how they made music from particle accelerators and turned unwanted data into art for HALO, their immersive response to the Large Hadron Collider for the Audemars Piguet Art Commission…We’re interested in how science and technology mediate nature to us – so for HALO, where we were artists in residence at CERN for three months, we were specifically interested in looking at the masses of data that is being collected there and using it in new ways.In very basic terms, what they’re doing at the Large Hadron Collider is sending protons in two different directions around a 26km circular tunnel underground, so that when they collide they produce new particles. And they’re looking at those new particles and seeing what comes out of it. And obviously they have very sophisticated ways of doing that…We wanted to go back and look at the data from one of their experiments (ATLAS) in as raw a form as possible – to when the data has just left the instrument, when it still bears a lot of the signatures of the technology. There’s so much data that comes out of the experiments that, somewhere along the line, they have to make decisions about what to keep and what to discard.What we like is there’s lots of stuff in there that, while it may not be useful to the scientists, looks beautiful: you get these dots and tracks in the way that it’s displayed. We were interested in exploring that as a quality in its own right – not presenting information scientifically but finding a way that transcended that. You get a sense that there’s a certain complexity going on in the image, and that there’s nature involved somewhere – there’s some sort of chaos going on, but you also have this framework of something manmade, and we like the interplay of that; something that is overwhelming but also quite humbling at the same time. The speed at which the experiments occur is completely beyond the limits of our perception too: it is measured in microseconds – or millionths of a second. And so what we’ve done is slow each event down to actually experience it.When you watch each of these events occurring, one after the other, your brain naturally starts to look for patterns in among the data.Of course, we had to convince lots of people that it’s a good idea to let some artists work with their scientific data! We had to promise that the data wasn’t going to be readable scientifically in any way. But none of that was ever our intention. It was literally on the last day of our residency that someone agreed that it would be okay for us to use it.Inside the structure of HALO is a 360-degree projection screen, and running vertically around the entire structure are 384 piano strings. And depending on when and where the data is projected onto the screens, it will also play a string at that point. So the sound created by the strings is completely synchronised with the image and is also located.The experiments at CERN are intended to replicate the conditions in the universe shortly after the Big Bang, with matter formation – when there was enough energy zooming around in the universe for particles to collide at very high energies – and how matter was formed. So we’ve created this immersive, audiovisual experience of matter formation, through the language and processes of science and technology. audemarspiguet.com/en/experience/ art-commission/