Worlds Collide is a live audiovisual performance integrating field recordings and imagery from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider with real-time generative systems. The work asks how quantum phenomena—typically accessible only through abstract models—can be translated into audiovisual form through computational processes.
The work draws on research in sonification and visualisation, where sound is framed as a mode of knowing model-based sonification engages underlying systems, and relationships between sensory modalities shape scientific communication. It also reflects particle physics practice, where phenomena are encountered through instrument-derived visualisations.
While these strands establish sound and image as interpretive modalities, they are typically developed independently. This project asks how a unified audiovisual system might integrate these modalities within a broader cultural context of scientific practice.
The project demonstrates a method for integrating scientific models and data within a unified audiovisual system. In Worlds Collide, principles such as interference and resonance are embedded as generative processes within the visual domain, coupled with an audio layer combining field recordings, sonified data, and musical material. Audio features modulate the behaviour and intensity of visual phenomena.
The work incorporates elements acknowledging the cultural and human dimensions of science while supporting a coherent aesthetic experience. It contributes a practice-based account of how audiovisual systems can translate complex scientific concepts into perceptual experiences that complement scientific explanation.
Research Background Worlds Collide is a live audiovisual performance integrating field recordings and imagery from CERN's Large Hadron Collider with real-time generative systems. Quantum phenomena are never directly perceptible, but always mediated through instrumentation. Barad (2007) argues that encounters with quantum phenomena are already acts of construction: they do not precede the apparatus through which they are measured. In scientific contexts this has been predominantly visual, as at CERN where collision events are encountered through instrument-derived representations. Sound offers a complementary mode of engagement, but Supper (2016) shows that the relationship between sonification and visual representation in scientific contexts remains unsettled. This research asks if an integrated audiovisual system, in which sound and image are co-generated via computational processes modelled on quantum phenomena, can offer a distinct form of experiential engagement with the quantum world? Research Contribution The project develops one such approach. Principles such as interference and resonance are embedded as generative processes in the visual domain, coupled with an audio layer of field recordings, sonified data, and live sound. Drawing on model-based data translation (Hermann, 2011) and on listening as engagement with otherwise inaccessible phenomena (Voegelin, 2010), audio features modulate visual behaviour, producing a system in which the modalities are interdependent. The work contributes a practice-based account of how such systems can translate scientific phenomena into perceptual experience that complements scientific explanation, while acknowledging the cultural and human dimensions of scientific practice. Research Significance This work was shown as an invited keynote performance at the G-Artience Global TechArt Rave in Daejeon, South Korea. G-Artience is the premiere international symposium on TechArt. The performance had an audience of 2100 from 23 countries.