Quantum Art & Uncertainty

Paul Thomas

Description

At the core of both art and science we find the twin forces of probability and uncertainty. However, these two worlds have been tenuously entangled for decades. On the one hand, artists continue to ask complex questions that align with a scientific fascination with new discoveries, and on the other hand, it is increasingly apparent that creativity and subjectivity inform science's objective processes and knowledge systems.

In order to draw parallels between art, science and culture, this publication will explore the ways that selected art works have contributed to a form of cultural pedagogy. It follows the integration of culture and science in artists' expressions to create meaningful experiences that expose the probabilities and uncertainties equally present in the world of science.

Acknowledgments 

Foreword 



Between Nothingness and Eternity

Timothy Morton



Introduction

The Quantum Atmospherics of Consciousness



Chapter 1: The Swerve

Agency of the swerve 

Measurement and control 

The Solvay rupture 

Capturing reality 

The unpredictable swerve 

Counterfactual definiteness of art 

Swerve speed 

Quantum biology

 

Chapter 2: The Diagram 

Convergence 

Diagram and the new language 

The line 

The flexible diagram 

Entanglement and space 

Multiverse 

Multiverse and parallel worlds 

Probability of facts 

In aid of the diagram

Photonic traces 

Bergson’s diagram and quantum parallels 

Bacon’s synergies

 

Chapter 3: Spin 

Quantum spin 

The creativity of the spin 

Quantum consciousness 

Consciousness and the swerve 

Chapter 4: The Graphene Moment 

The genealogy of graphite 

The haptic Atomic Force Microscope 

Agency and mediums 

The art of graphite

Drawing out 

Performative agency 

Chapter 5: Cloud 

The itinerant cloud 

Shifting power of perspective 

Pre-cloud conscious 

Repositioning the cloud 

The machinic whole 

Engineer’s perspective

Conclusion 

Fragments 

References 

Author’s Biography 

Index

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• History of art
• General officer
• Multiverse
• Art
• General
• History
• Eternity
• Graphite
• Science
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783209026
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2018 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2018 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas and Paul Thomas
Index: Lyn Greenwood
Production manager: Mareike Wehner
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-901-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-903-3
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-902-6
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Between Nothingness and Eternity
Timothy Morton
Introduction
The Quantum Atmospherics of Consciousness
Chapter 1: The Swerve
Agency of the swerve
Measurement and control
The Solvay rupture
Capturing reality
The unpredictable swerve
Counterfactual definiteness of art
Swerve speed
Quantum biology
Chapter 2: The Diagram
Convergence
Diagram and the new language
The line
The flexible diagram
Entanglement and space
Multiverse
Multiverse and parallel worlds
Probability of facts
In aid of the diagram
Photonic traces
Bergson’s diagram and quantum parallels
Bacon’s synergies
Chapter 3: Spin
Quantum spin
The creativity of the spin
Quantum consciousness
Consciousness and the swerve
Chapter 4: The Graphene Moment
The genealogy of graphite
The haptic Atomic Force Microscope
Agency and mediums
The art of graphite
Drawing out
Performative agency
Chapter 5: Cloud
The itinerant cloud
Shifting power of perspective
Pre-cloud conscious
Repositioning the cloud
The machinic whole
Engineer’s perspective
Conclusion
Fragments
References
Author’s Biography
Index
Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the support of Thomas Retter for his reflections, challenges, comments and elucidations and the support of my collaborator Kevin Raxworthy for all his work in developing the technical visualization of the quantum phenomena. I would also like to draw attention to the work of Professor Andrea Morello and Dr Juan Pablo Dehollain for their support with my artwork Quantum Consciousness based on their research in Quantum Computing. Thanks goes to Emma Crott and special thanks goes to Timothy Morton for contributing the foreword for this book.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife Christina Newberry for putting up with me endlessly talking about quantum uncertainties.
Paul Thomas, 2018
Foreword

Between Nothingness and Eternity
Timothy Morton
Rice University
What is life? It’s a question answered most interestingly by physicists, not biologists. It’s a curious symptom of biology that it cannot question its initial starting assumption, namely the ‘life’ of which it is the science. Debates about the origins of life are notoriously becalmed in an ocean of doubt concerning whether metabolism or replication is the driver. This means that evolution theory, for example, can’t actually explain the origin of a single-celled organism, the most fascinating aspect of the whole thing. Evolution theory can explain what happens next – all lifeforms unintentionally act like human pigeon breeders, exerting adaptive pressure on them from all sides. But the starting position remains obscure.
Two physicists have offered interesting explanations of life. One is a cosmologist, the other a quantum theorist. But the cosmologist deals with photons in his explanation, which makes him a quantum theorist by default. The quantum theorist is Erwin Schrödinger, whose What Is Life? has recently undergone a refreshment of study and discussion.
The cosmologist, a young physicist named Jeremy England, has recently argued that if you just beam photons at atoms for long enough time, life will emerge. This is simple and amazing, because it implies that there really isn’t all that much to life (as opposed to non-life) as one might have thought. It’s a readily-available aspect of our reality. It’s all about patterns.
Schrödinger’s What Is Life? is fascinating, because it argues that I wouldn’t be stable enough to write this sentence if it weren’t for millions of tiny quantum events taking place in my body. I would dissolve into a cloud of powder. My very solidity depends on how particles can suddenly change, become entangled, blur into one another. These properties bestow upon me what Schrödinger calls negentropy , a temporary suspension of the normal rules whereby the arrow of time moves only in one direction and things tend towards collapsing. Life is a little pocket of stability in the universe.
But what kind of stability? A dynamic, metastable state that isn’t solid or permanent according to our ideas of such things. Life isn’t total presence, always consistent and smooth. It’s like one of Paul Thomas’s extraordinary artworks, subtle and trembling.
Where do we locate this trembling in a metaphysical sense? We locate it between two kinds of death. Life is not the opposite of death, but a strange quivering of the needle between two different types of being dead. At one end of the spectrum we have total nonexistence. At the other end, we have total mechanical repetition, perpetual motion, the machination that Freud called the death drive . If the needle stops quivering between these poles and slips towards the pole of total nonexistence, the living being begins to dissolve, to drift into powder, to become the chemicals that composed it. If the needle stops quivering and is attracted to the pole of mechanical repetition, the living being becomes a relentless force, like a drill or a tornado.
We live in a world where there is way too much attraction towards the mechanical pole, in the name of warding off the pole of total nonexistence. Agriculture as formulated in Mesopotamia and elsewhere in about 10,000 BC eventually gave rise to industry in order to keep its mechanically repetitive logistics going, and the end result, 200 years later, is mass extinction, politely called global warming, which in turn is politely called climate change. It’s the death drive all right. Humans have been weaponized. They have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale. Despite our individual intentions, and despite the actual statistical meaninglessness of our individual actions (don’t feel guilty, ecological awareness isn’t about that at all), humans as a massive collective force have become like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, the asteroid that was the cause of the most recent mass extinction, the fifth one. Think about that. You are part of an asteroid hurtling towards earth, metaphorically speaking. As you read this, your human beingness is hurtling towards earth with massive destructive momentum.
Art suspends and postpones this momentum. One keen reader of poetry once declared that poetry was the postponement of the end of the world. One more quivering, for old times’ sake. One more tremble. One more flicker of the needle, defying the magnetic attraction of the weaponizing mechanical death drive.
Art that works on the trembling, fragile edge of quantum phenomena is particularly suspended between the two deaths. Paul Thomas does what artists do: he resists collapsing into oblivion (the art and culture equivalent of total nonexistence), and he resists falling into mechanical repetition (the dull round of churning out ‘stuff’). Thomas’s work is alive, but not in your granddaddy’s sense of being opposed to death, or for that matter, Ray Kurzweil’s sense of wanting to cheat death by having his body frozen until humans have conquered death. Such fantasies are part of the logistical structure that is now destroying earth. We should learn how to dissolve a little bit. A little bit of total nonexistence wouldn’t be so bad right now.
Life as quivering between nothingness and eternity isn’t so easy to distinguish from the state we call undeath . This ghostly flicker is lively but not definitely alive, as we’ve seen. So thinking about lifeforms this way means that we allow them to be uncanny, hard to discriminate, hard to build walls around, inviting otherness, open to strangers, with all that this entails, as in the word host . This word comes from a Latin word ( hostis ) that can mean both friend and enemy . Exactly: real life is very uncertain, and a good thing too. The maniacal pursuit of certainty becomes more and more efficient at destroying its environment. There is some kind of link between the art of the quantum and the caring for the biosphere we call ecological awareness and politics. Quantum states are notoriously delicate, capable of collapsing into regular old ‘classical’ ones if you interfere with them too much. Likewise, beauty can be ruined if you think about it too hard or try to isolate its active ingredient in the work you are admiring. This fragility is immensely powerful, because it disturbs and challenges rigid binary ways of thinking and acting.
The power of uncertainty. That’s what this book is all about.
It’s a great honour to introduce this book to you. Paul Thomas is a brilliant observer of things, a fantastic decelerator who interrupts the normal speed of contemporary life. I once took a walk down a street with him that seemed to last for thousands of years because of the amazingly careful observation of every flake of paint, every crack between every building. Thomas is an observer of the in-between, as I’ve been arguing, the in-between that so often gets left out of the nice binary picture. But we all know that total nonexistence is impossible – plenty of philosophers, all the way back to Ar