Welcome to ∆ (delta).
You can either go directly to the work itself or read the work description first.
Please read the following instructions carefully.
The piece works best on Safari or Google Chrome browsers.
Once you've read through the instructions, you can enter the room.
To progress, tap the delta sign:
Please enable "do not disturb",
set the volume to max and
disable silent mode*.
Please do not use headphones.
If everything is working, you will hear a sound.
Tap four times to progress.
This work only unfolds completely when four or more people are present in the same physical space.
If there are not that many people present yet, just start and listen how the work changes with additional visitors joining.
Tap twice to progress.
One loop of the work takes roughly 15 minutes.
You can join and leave any time you want.
Tap twice to progress.
Walk in the direction shown on your screen once you enter the room. There are two different directions possible. The instructions are finished after this step.
If others are already walking, join them. If you're the first, start walking.
Continue walking until you leave the work.
Slide to continue.
∆ was developed within the Connect residency at CERN by Amanda E. Metzger.
The work explores the gap between reality and its reconstruction.
At CERN, particles (the smallest entities existing in our universe) are sped up in accelerators and then fed into the Large Hadron Collider, where they are smashed into each other at near speed of light at specific points along the LHC. These collisions are observed closely by detectors, who collect a large amount of data in order to reconstruct what happens and learn more about the existence of the universe.
Arriving at CERN, the artist was impressed by the pronounced collaborative efforts among the scientists which made her want to create something which can only be experienced with multiple people present.
A motif of the work is the wave: On a particle level, everything is waves. The motif can be found in the hands gesturing in the visuals (some of the gestures were taken from CERN scientists' explanations) as well as in the sound and spoken texts. Most of the text is in a poetic metre which creates wave-like speech-patterns.
The visuals are composed of layered images as well as some drawings. Pixels, which make up digital images, are measurements of light in a specific location. The drawings are in SVG (scalable vector graphics) format and can thus be calculated with mathematical precision.
The sound consists of field recordings of particle accelerators at CERN (the machines that speed up particles to near speed of light, at which velocity they collide in the LHC) and memories of the artist. As the artist exists as a network of selves and her nodes can go to events individually, she records her memories in order to share and reconstruct them across her nodes.
CERN is also the birth place of the World Wide Web, which was invented there in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee with the intention to create a network over which data can be easily shared for collaborative purposes. Because of this, the artwork exists as a website and can only unfold in collaboration.
This work would not have been possible without the many people I spoke to at CERN and everyone else who supported me.
