Geneva, 4 August 2011. Today CERN* launches its cultural policy for engaging with the arts. Called 'Great Arts for Great Science', this new cultural policy has a central strategy - a selection process for arts engagement at the level of one of the world's leading research organizations.

"This puts CERN's engagement with the arts on a similar level as the excellence of its science," said Ariane Koek, CERN's cultural specialist.

CERN's newly appointed Cultural Board for the Arts will be the advisers and guardians of quality. It is made up of renowned cultural leaders in the arts from CERN's host-state countries: Beatrix Ruf, Director of the Kunsthalle Zurich; Serge Dorny, Director General of the Lyon Opera House; Franck Madlener, Director of the music institute IRCAM in Paris. Geneva and CERN are represented by Christoph Bollman of ArtbyGenève and Michael Doser, an antimatter scientist. Membership of the board is an honorary position that will change every three years.

The Cultural Board will select one or two art projects a year to receive a CERN letter of approval, enabling these projects to seek external funding for their particle-physics inspired work. This will also build up an international portfolio of CERN-inspired work over the years to come, in conjunction with the Collide@CERN Artists Residency Programme, details of which will be announced in the coming month.

Director General of CERN, Rolf Heuer, welcomed the new policy and Cultural Board. "Together science and the arts form culture - our expression of what it is to be human in our universe. Our work is in science, but when we engage with the arts, we want to ensure we approach the same level of quality," he said.

As part of the new cultural policy, CERN is forming partnerships with leading international arts organizations. The first of these is the prestigious digital arts organization in Austria, Ars Electronica, which today is announcing CERN as the main focus in this year's Ars Electronica Festival, entitled 'Origins'. Talks by CERN Director General, Rolf Heuer, spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment, Fabiola Gianotti, and CERN Director of Research and Scientific Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, together with other luminaries from the worlds of science and the arts, will feature in the festival's symposium.

"We are very excited about the creative collisions that will come out of our cultural partnership with Ars Electronica and the festival this year. As one of the world's foremost digital arts origanizations, devoted to the intersection between technology, arts and society, the cultural partnership with Ars Electronica is a fantastic match for CERN," said Michael Doser.

Source: CERN website