CERN announces first winners of the Accelerate@CERN arts programme

Image: CERN

CERN: Press Releases

CERN today announces the first winners of the Laboratory’s new Accelerate @ CERN programme – a one-month research award for artists. The winners, from the fields of Visual Arts and Interactive Web Art, are drawn from the first two participating countries, Greece and Switzerland respectively.

The winner of the Greek award, held in collaboration with the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens and funded by the Onassis Foundation, is the Greek visual artist Nikos Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos was chosen according to the jury for his artistic record and the originality of the project “which combines the study of nature and science in a way that highlights both the conceptual background of the link between them and the aesthetic aspect of the visual approach that the artist will attempt”.

The award for the Swiss interactive web artist, funded by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia as part of their programme “Mobile. In Touch with Digital Creation”, was given to two 27-year-olds who applied as a pair – interactive designer Nadezda Suvorova who is completing her MA in Media Design at HEAD, Geneva this month, and the multi-award-winning Zurich-based game-designer Mario von Rickenbach.

Suvorova and von Rickenbach were given the award because “their work is capable of visualizing complex science, making it more accessible in interesting ways as well as being also artistically original and exciting”. Their proposal uses gaming techniques to put members of the public in the position of scientists conducting an experiment, using the complex data at CERN.

“CERN is a user facility that’s host to some 11,000 scientists who come here to do their scientific research,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “I’m happy to welcome also these artistic researchers to our community.”

CERN signed, on 6^th June, an agreement with the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan to fund an Accelerate @ CERN programme next year for a digital programmer and choreographer to win a one-month research stay at the Laboratory.

www.cern.ch