It is difficult to remain unimpressed by CERN, on many levels. The sheer size, intricacy and technology of the machinery deployed over tens of years to reach ever higher collisional energies, to probe ever deeper into the fundaments of nature, is a testament to the determination of an unprecedented collective scientific effort. At the same time, those very same instruments constitute the only experience that we as humans can obtain of the microscopic underlying physics that CERN has been built to study.

A good portion of today's research in physics does not rely on direct interaction with the objects of study, simply because these are outside the reach of our senses and exist on extreme time and length scales. But in particle physics and, in particular, at CERN, the distance between us and the physical phenomena is pushed to another level of complexity. It is perhaps this very complexity that inspired the work of Ryoji Ikeda, who, with his exhibition Supersymmetry (http://supersymmetry.ycam.jp/en/), which was recently at The Vinyl Factory in London, unveils an aesthetic representation of the intangible subatomic world.

Ryoji Ikeda spent six months at CERN as artist-in-residence after receiving the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN Award in 2014 for his media art drawing based on CERN's processing and analysis of data. Supersymmetry is clearly the result of this experience, but the name might be misleading. Whereas, for the physicist, at least, the exhibition has little to do with SUSY, the audio-visual experience does create the feeling of being inside a bubble chamber, the eerie sounds marking the trajectories of unseen particles. And the retro touch seems reminiscent of some areas of CERN, like certain dusty control rooms and old-fashioned offices.

The Supersymmetry exhibition is split into two parts, akin to the two levels on which we perceive physical phenomena. The first one, the 'experiment', allows the visitor to directly witness a phenomenon: three tables illuminated in the dark featuring moving axes and hypnotic patterns of hundreds of tiny beads (pictured left). The second dark room hosts the 'experience', which provides an overwhelming sensory immersion into the maddening world of data, analysed as if from a CERN control room. One is assaulted by elusive, fast-changing sound and image patterns on tens of monitors and wall projections (pictured above). At times one can almost make sense of the large amounts of data, only to be lost again in a sea of noise. Finding oneself continuously on the brink of grasping a pattern in an otherwise discordant cacophony seems also to be the theme of most of Ikeda's music, which he performed live in the Supercodex show at the Barbican, London, on 27 May 2015.

As in his previous works, Ikeda brings data alive in a disconcerting yet eerily beautiful experience. Taking on particle physics as a source of inspiration is certainly a challenge, but he prevails, providing us with a fascinating way of seeing the unseen.

Information about upcoming exhibitions worldwide can be found at http://www.ryojiikeda.com.