Chris Henschke
Beyond the Quantum Horizon
Performance
Photo: Chris Henschke
No other artist has engaged as deeply with the scientific work at CERN as Chris Henschke. In numerous projects, he has repeatedly found new ways to make the complex and often elusive nature of this research accessible through the senses. His work has focused primarily on the particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider, which are measured by four particle detectors. The new audiovisual work Beyond the Quantum Horizon, inspired by the SciArt Dialogue Week 2026, marks a turning point. The question of how a particle collision is even possible in the first place led the artist to explore quantum fields.
“This question contains an ontological and ethical dimension,” says Henschke. “If physical reality is a quantum field, then everything is fundamentally connected and there is no possibility of absolute separability.”
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
In cooperation with ORF musikprotokoll, art@CMS/ORIGIN, CERN – European Organization for Nuclear Research (with the experiments ATLAS – A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS, ALICE – A Large Ion Collider Experiment, CMS – Compact Muon Solenoid, LHCb – Large Hadron Collider beauty, and IdeaSquare – Innovation Space at CERN), University of Graz (Department of Arts and Musicology and interdisciplinary core research area “Perception: Episteme, Aesthetics, Politics” at the Faculty of Humanities), University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (Institute 11 Stage Design), HEPHY – Institute of High Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Florida State University, The University of Alabama, and RMIT University