CERN was a special guest this year at the famous Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. The theme of this year’s festival 'Origin — how it all begins' relates to the diverse research carried out at CERN. Arts@CERN will collaborate with the organisers of the festival over the next three years.

A wide range of art works were shown during the week-long festival. Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN, and Arianne Koek, who is behind the Arts@CERN initiative, were present during the symposium on the first two days. Participants at the symposium were given a scientific introduction by Michael Doser, Werner Riegler (ALICE), Joao Pequenao (ATLAS) and Dietrich Liko (CMS).

In the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), the main building of the festival features a high-resolution 3D cinema called Deep Space. In this marvelous 'light theatre' with a screen 16m wide and 9m high, the CMS 3D movie 'Inside LHC' was shown four times a day to a large public audience, with more people present than there were seats available. This movie was produced by Laurenz Widhalm (HEPHY) and myself, and was presented with background music and live commentary by Markus Friedl, Thomas Bergauer, Laurenz Widhalm and myself. A 2D version can be viewed on YouTube, and versions in English and French will be available soon.

The Deep Space cinema also showcased an animation of the CERN accelerator chain by Joao Pequenao as well as our ultra-high-resolution CMS Photo — the one that is displayed in Building 40 at CERN’s Meyrin site. On the 16m-wide screen we were not only able to demonstrate the real size of our beautiful CMS detector, but we could zoom in to all detector elements to give detailed answers to the various questions asked. This festival was a great occasion to present our passion to a large, very interested audience with little particle physics knowledge.

— Submitted by Michael Hoch