Alice, Interrupted

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you for coming to the opening night of the Tate-Tech’s latest show, ‘Time, Contested.’ The show is comprised of a wide variety of pieces from artists all over the world, each of whom delivers a critique or comment regarding our current prevailing assumptions about the 4th Dimension: Time.

Before we open the gallery, I would like to say a few words about the highly anticipated art offering called, ‘Alice, Interrupted,’ which we at the Tate-Tech are extremely proud to be premiering this evening. It is, without a doubt, our most controversial piece. Perhaps the most controversial piece in the Tate-Tech’s history. Found Object Artist, ‘Restes’, is a politically passionate TD-2 Artist (Techno Dumpster-Diver, for those of you not familiar with the term), who collected this piece from the trash bin behind CERN, on the French-Swiss border. As is his habit, he offers no commentary with this submission.

I do, however, have a few things to say about it. (laughter)

With regard to CERN, and this piece specifically, conspiracy theories abound. Much is suspected, little is known.

What we do feel certain about is that ‘Alice, Interrupted’ is the product of an experiment gone-wrong in the hadron collider at CERN. We believe it is the result of an accident that occurred at the facility in 2009 which involved the destruction of several of the magnets located in a sector of the machine which is known by the name, Alice.

Alice, Interrupted

Leading physicists have offered many theories to explain this entity, the most accepted explanation currently being, that it is history’s first example of the physical presentation of anti-matter: the ‘supersymmetric partner’ to matter that – had the collider been working properly – the accelerated protons would have simply passed through. Instead, due to some imbalance (perhaps a nano-segment of insufficient magnetic strength) a ‘magnet quench’ occurred, causing the accelerated particles the join with other particles from a specific space-time ‘lo-ment’ (localized-moment). The force of the reaction dragged the particles into the accelerator, contaminating the vacuum pipe. Nano-seconds later, the collider’s sensors detected the anomaly and shut down the machines, causing two tons of liquid hydrogen to spill out.

Within this material, something was hidden – something which only revealed itself as temperatures cooled. Bits and pieces of supersymmetric photon partners coalesced, forming this fascinating and disturbing entity which stands – or sits – (laughter) before us now: ‘Alice, Interrupted.’

Experts place the approximate lo-ment of its source material to be somewhere near Paris in the late 1920s.

I won’t speak or speculate any further, and I invite you all to leave your preconceived notions at the door. Approach ‘Alice, Interrupted’ with an open mind. Experience ‘Alice.’ Experience yourself in its presence. And come to your own conclusions.