Supernova
Exhibition
Photo: Artem Sivashenko
The microcosm and the macrocosm have always been directly connected. The building blocks that make up our home planet, Earth, and ourselves were formed either shortly after the Big Bang or through nuclear fusion inside stars, to be hurled into space during supernovae. At CERN, research into this relationship is a central focus.
Since 2012, the art@CMS/ORIGIN outreach program has been connecting the scientific community surrounding the CMS particle detector with artists, art students, and art educators to inspire as many people as possible to take an interest in particle physics. In January 2026, as part of the course Interdisciplinary Spaces 2, a group of students from the IEM – Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics traveled to CERN for SciArt Dialogue Week 2026, organized by art@CMS/ORIGIN. A student from Australia’s RMIT University also joined the group. The experiences and insights gained there formed the starting point for the works in this exhibition, which are being presented for the first time.
A project of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (Institute 11 Stage Design)
In cooperation with ORF musikprotokoll, Folk Life Museum at the Paulustor, 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), HEPHY – Institute of High Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Florida State University, and RMIT University