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collider

The Science Museum

HUFFINGTON POST

“Go see it! You will be amazed and enthralled!”

★★★★★

THE INDEPENDENT

“Art and science really do collide, with spectacular results.”

★★★★★

Video in the Collider exhibition is used to deliver a theatrical storytelling experience for the visitor and to augment the wider exhibition environment.


The exhibition has a narrative journey from the lecture hall of CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) down into the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and the particle detectors that surround it.  This journey begins by announcing the discovery of the Higgs Boson with a video displayed on a 13m wide, 3m high curved screen.  Using such a large curved screen envelops the audience in the experience by filling their peripheral vision with images from around CERN.


As you move through the exhibition you meet various real world scientists and engineers who emerge from the walls and talk directly to you about their work at CERN.  This gives the audience a very direct experience of what life is like first hand in this curious place.


Next you come to one of the highlights of the exhibition, the Particle Collision.  This was our largest design challenge: how do you visualise something you can’t actually see and scientists themselves can only see through graphs of electromagnetic activity?  After visiting CERN three times, talking to scientists and collaborating with NRS we arrived at a 3 minute journey, presented on a circular screen, 7m in diameter with 270º of projection that put the viewer in the centre.  

Fray Team

Creative Direction: Finn Ross

Creative Direction: Adam Young

Animation: Adam Young

Creative Team

Curator: Alison Boyle

Creative Director: Pippa Nissen

3D Design: Nissen Richards Studio

Video: Finn Ross & Adam Young

Hand-drawn Animation & Graphic Design - Northover & Brown

Lighting: Zerlina Hughes for Studio ZNA

Sound: Carolyn Downing


The journey begins in one of the cathedral sized detector caverns and moves you inside the detector where you join a flow of protons and witness the proton collision, the source of all discovery within the LHC.  You then see the conclusion of the drama that began in the lecture hall in an office, the end wall is video in which our main scientist character is working.


The journey ends in a space for reflection on what you have learned and what may come from the work in the LHC.  The video creates a wall for imagination, projecting analogies of the ideas discussed in the space on the end wall, joining lines of print with lines of video and images forming from the lines.  A table sits in the centre of the space, brought to life by video so that scientific ideas can be explained by animation projected on to the note pads and bits of paper lying on the table.



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