To infinity and beyond: the spectacular sensory overload of Ryoji Ikeda’s art

The implicit message of human smallness in a vast universe is an upshot of the time Ikeda spent at Cern. “The mecca of particle physics” turned him, he freely admits, into something of an “anti-humanist”. Handed a set of keys and the freedom to roam the labs at will, he felt that the quest to resolve the mystery of the universe was premised on blind faith: the research performed by the scientists is “completely invisible”, so “unthinkably small that they can’t see it or touch it”.