CERN Computer, control rooms, Geneva Switzerland

Armin Linke was born in Milan in 1966. He works as a photographer and filmmaker. His work is characterised by the use of a range of contemporary image processing technologies to blur the boundary between fiction and reality. In his motifs, the artist explores the design of our technological and urban environment. In a collective approach, collaborating with other artists, curators and scientists, the narratives of his works expand on the level of multiple discourses.
The colour photograph ‘CERN Computer, control rooms, Geneva Switzerland’ is the result of Armin Linke's stay in Geneva, Switzerland. There, the artist met the Italian physicists Maria and Giuseppe Fideccaro, who began their work at CERN in 1956, just two years after it was founded. Giuseppe Fideccaro worked on CERN's first accelerator, the synchrocyclotron, which was in operation until 1990, while Maria Fideccaro researched a new method for generating polarised proton beams. The laboratory depicted shows their research facility, which they still visit almost every day. The photograph, printed on aluminium, not only shows the material infrastructure and the technology developed at the computing centre, but also becomes a kind of portrait. It documents the history of CERN in the field of computer science. The photograph is therefore both a work of art and a historical document.