Tania Candiani

HUM is a video work by Tania Candiani, commissioned by Arts at CERN and created during her artistic residency in dialogue with scientists, engineers, and the architecture of the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. HUM explores the universal language of the trumpet shape—a form resonating through nature, culture, and the cosmos. Blending visual and auditory layers, it traces connections from sinkholes and black holes to ancient instruments and conceptual thought, from alpine alphorns to experiments at CERN. Through intricate soundscapes and imagery, it examines how this geometry amplifies the connections between the human, the natural, and the infinite, inviting viewers to uncover the unseen threads interweaving our world. Rooted in the symbolic and acoustic power of the spiral, HUM explores how sound—specifically the low-frequency hum of machines, breath, and instruments—can evoke the invisible forces that shape our universe. At the center of the work is the Alphorn, an ancient wind instrument whose deep resonance connects the ancestral with the cosmic. Filmed across multiple experimental zones within CERN—such as the ALICE and CMS experiments, the Data Centre, LINAC 4, and the Large Magnet Facility—HUM transforms these scientific sites into stages of sonic and poetic reflection. The spiral becomes both a visual and conceptual structure, drawing parallels between sound waves, data flows, and cosmological patterns. By bringing together scientific and artistic vocabularies, HUM opens a space for intuition and sensorial inquiry within environments dedicated to reason and precision. It invites viewers to listen—to machines, to space, to the body—and to consider the hum as a shared frequency between matter and meaning.

Commissioned by Arts at CERN with the generous support of the Didier and Martine Primat Foundation and its special fund, Odonata, Geneva.