Andrew Stones - ATLAS

Andrew Stones’ major new installation for Chisenhale Gallery is based on video and audio material recorded at CERN, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire in France. This vast organisation houses some of the world’s largest machines that are deployed in the search for matter’s smallest particles. Using seven projection screens and multi-channel sound, ATLAS depicts three zones of the CERN nuclear research complex: the underground 'Atlas' detector chamber, an underground particle accelerator (the ‘Super Positron Synchrotron’), and the offices of two CERN-based physicists. CERN’s Atlas detector chamber is a huge collective civil engineering project, revealed in Stones’ installation as a frieze-like triptych whose images crawl continuously across three large screens. For Stones, this gargantuan concrete chamber is reminiscent of certain fabulous building projects, such as Noah's Ark or the Tower of Babel, which the scholars and artists of earlier centuries attempted to re-imagine and re-engineer. ATLAS explores how we can be seduced and awed by aspects of science but simultaneously excluded from its processes. Stones’ video and audio projects are concerned with how scientific knowledge appears to offer deep understandings which often challenge the value of subjective experience, leaving the individual in an unsettled 'insider/outsider' state. ATLAS is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Chisenhale Gallery, supported by Arts Council England. Project research has been supported by a Fellowship from NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, UK). PUBLICATION: Outside Inside - Andrew Stones, pub. Film and Video Umbrella, London 2004, full colour, 148pp, ISBN 190427-009-3. A comprehensive monograph representing the artist's large scale video, multi-media and site-specific installations from the late 1980s to the present day. Pressetext

Andrew Stones - ATLAS