Everyone agrees what the LHC needs is more art.

Okay, no one actually thinks that.  What the LHC needs is to find a Higgs boson or a whole bunch of Europeans outside physics are going to be annoyed they spent $10 billion to find the "God particle" and will now be told 'we advanced science by not finding it'.   Most people don't think in terms of negatives, they think in terms of positives, so in a bad economy the political questions will be 'why did we spend billions of Euros to confirm the non-existence of something a lot of physicists didn't think existed anyway?'

That's a future topic.  Back to art.  The Collide@CERN artists’ residency program is an add-on to its Great Arts for Great Science outreach effort announced in August. Collide@CERN is an international competition that will run for a period of three years and during each year, artists working in different art forms will get a funded residency for up to three months. 

“Science underpins much of modern society and has an influence on the everyday lives of all of us,” said CERN Director General, Rolf Heuer. “As such, it’s important for scientific organizations like CERN to engage with society on many levels, and for us, Collide@CERN is an important element of that engagement.”

It is assumed Heuer will allow participants to interpret art.  He has frowned upon interpreting physics that might annoy climate change researchers.

Artists are invited to apply for the Prix Electronica Collide@CERN prize for Digital Arts, which will consist of a two-part residency. Two months will be spent at CERN, where the winning artist will team up with a scientist as inspirational partner, followed by one month at Ars Electronica, where the artist will develop work inspired by the time spent at CERN. Finally, the work will be showcased both at CERN and at the next Ars Electronica Festival, where the next application round for the Digital Arts prize will also be announced.

The second strand of Collide@CERN, covering the disciplines of dance and performance, will be unveiled in November.  That's right, dancing about physics.

“The arts touch the parts that science alone cannot reach, and vice versa,” said Ariane Koek, CERN's cultural specialist. “Collide@CERN gives CERN, artists and scientists the opportunity to engage in creative collisions that can occur when these two areas of human creativity and ingenuity come together.”

The program is made possible by funding from Ars Electronica for the Digital Arts Prize for the prize money, private individual donors for the residency) and from the City and the Canton of Geneva for dance and performance for the prize money and residency.