∆ (delta)

𝚫 (delta) is developed within the CERN Connect residency and takes the form of a website for mobile phones, fully unfolding its narration only when visitors gather in a space together.

The exhibition examines the effects of data as abstraction and asks what the resulting difference (𝚫) between reality and its reconstruction produces: what is displaced, reduced, or rendered inaccessible in the process of making data and, in parallel, in the formation of personal memories. The web-based work thus also reflects on the original intention behind the World Wide Web, developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), that data should be accessible to anyone from anywhere. 

The guiding question structuring the work is based on the main experiments conducted at CERN: the recording of particle collisions in order to observe the fragments produced and to gain a better insight into the creation of the universe. The challenge of recording these events and reconstructing them with sufficient precision for subsequent study is closely linked to the challenge of recording, mediating and distributing memories. This forms a central concern within the practice of the artist Amanda E. Metzger, who - since 2022 - has experimented with establishing a network of herself by initiating nodes in different cities across Europe, forming a "multi-bodymind". In this way, she attends events and collects these experiences which serve as material for her output.

At CERN, rigorous processes are in place to collect data from particle collisions and to reconstruct it in order to understand what has occurred. From this perspective, attention turns to everything that is lost in this process and, given that particle physics still contains many unresolved problems, to everything that cannot be captured or reconstructed at all. In conversation with scientists working primarily on the algorithmic reconstruction of data, and in considering how perception shapes reality even at the level of particles, a further question emerges: to which reality does the collected data actually belong?