Contributing blogger, Julianne Aguilar, UNM art student assistant

It’s done!

Projecting pARTicles is up and running, and what an experience it’s been. Neither heat nor humidity could stop us! With the Bienal opening today we didn’t finish a moment too soon.

We had a moment of scariness when we were told all our equipment had to go through customs, but we made it through.

Focuses have shifted to the student workshop, where Agnes is teaching the Tagtool app. But that’s not the most exciting part! The Bienal has graciously and awesomely invited Dr. Luis Roberto Flores Castillo to come to Havana and be a part of the workshop. Luis isn’t just any physicist – he was a part of the CERN team that discovered the Higgs Particle! He is also a professor at the University of Hong Kong. The Atlas Experiment at CERN is sponsoring Luis to help make this possible.

Luis will do a presentation to the scientific community on Saturday at 5pm at the Salon de Mayo in the Pabellon building. Needless to say it is an extreme honor to have him here with us. As part of the workshop, he is teaching the kids about the Higgs and other tenets of particle physics. I can’t think of a better person to do it!

Tomorrow we’ll all be giving a presentation about Projecting pARTicles, and today the final, final, final finishing touches are going into the installation. It’s been a crazy ride but it’s all coming together in a pretty great way!

The Biennal fabrication team could not have been more helpful, understanding and cool, and we could not have done any of this without them. Cheers to them!