The What If?... Scenario (after LG)

This catalogue accompanies the eponymous exhibition at TBA21–Augarten in Vienna and brings together threads and voices of leading contemporary artists, scientists, and theoreticians exploring Cerith Wyn Evans’s polyphonic oeuvre.
A reality where matter meets dark matter, where the existence of a new elementary particle is conjured from theory—like an alternative world unlocked by psychotropic drugs—and results in the most complex experimental facilities ever built, brings us to the heart of Wyn Evans’s new work at the Augarten, A Community Predicated on the Basic Fact Nothing Really Matters, but also figures as a conceptual model for the publication. CERN—the European Laboratory for Particle Physics—is devoted to the detection of a particle of the most labile and liminal nature, the Higgs boson. The Higgs is an afterthought, the materialization of wishful thinking: the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is constructed entirely on the fiction of a simulated projection of the missing particle whose necessity was postulated long before its discovery. A Community Predicated on the Basic Fact Nothing Really Matters centers on the Higgs on the one hand and the formula for LSD on the other, both containing the potential of generating new worlds.
Copublished with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
Design by Sara Hartman and John McCusker with Vela Arbutina
Edited by Eva Wilson and Daniela Zyman
Contributions by Liam Gillick, Florian Hecker, Carsten Höller, Robin Mackay, Jeannie Moser, Molly Nesbit, Olaf Nicolai, Martin Prinzhorn, Maria Spiropulu, Eva Wilson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Daniela Zyman