One hundred years after Einstein's theory of relativity destroyed the notions of absolute space and time, 'HyperCollider' explores the extremes of relativity and Einstein's unwillingness to accept these implications of his own theories. Dubbed the 'Three Gates of Time', these extremes include Black Holes, the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. 'HyperCollider' also plays with the absurdities that occur when relativity collides with quantum physics and some of the strange theoretical worlds that exist on paper.

Collaged from early relativity textbooks and Einstein's own handwritten notes, 'HyperCollider' is housed within a 1920’s German style pinball machine cabinet, this device is a hybrid of a pinball game, gramophone player and particle accelerator. The audience interacts with the work through flipper buttons and an antique spring-loaded trigger, allowing a selection of subatomic particles to be launched into HyperCollider. ‘Players’ bounce particles off one another into a black hole in the centre of the HyperCollider manifold, where they observe spatial and temporal dilation effects, and move into an increasingly uncertain future. As this project is based in pop-science, its accompanying soundtrack had to be constructed from particles of pop-music, commencing with familiar sounds of the early 20th century, and potentially ending up in sound environments aeons into the future. The soundtrack can be downloaded from here.

'HyperCollider' was developed during Henschke's inaugural online artist in residency at the National Gallery of Australia with programming assistance by Ken Mok. Further development was made possible through by the Film Victorial Digital Media Fund, and was physically built by furniture maker Linden Davey-Milne. As well as being exhibited in a variety of galleries, 'HyperCollider' was shown at the Australian Synchrotron open day in February 2005. It won the 'World Year of Physics Art Prize' in December 2005 and was acquired by Macquarie University for their permanent collection.

CLICK HERE to play the online version of 'HyperCollider', as well as images, movies and articles, courtesy of the 'Symmetry' journal of particle physics.