Four Invitations Into the Unknown

Invitation 1 for ” The Environment as a Witness” exhibition.

(in Hebrew “הסביבה כעדות”).

The four different invitations I issued for my coming up exhibition ” The Environment as a Witness”, borrowed their title from a preprint on quantum mechanics by the same name, with the secondary title: “Selective Proliferation of Information and Emergence of Objectivity in a quantum Universe”. see here.

A perhaps somewhat tricky quotation from the abstract may convey the flavor of the article and his resonance on the exhibition:

…”We study the role of the information deposited in the environment of an open quantum system in course of the decoherence process. Redundant spreading of information — the fact that some observables of the system can be independently “read-off” from many distinct fragments of the environment — is investigated as the key to effective objectivity, the essential ingredient of “classical reality”.”…

However, in plain English, the meaning is: how we the common humans, aka this article, agree together to see what seems to us the same objective reality made from ‘ .. many distinct fragments of the environment “….

As someone whose trade is to making pictures from what he sees, this allover passing agreement on a reality based on an unseen quantum substrate is an intriguing mystery.

So, if I want to marry human mysteries with quantum mysteries in an art gallery, for the human side of this marriage, a good story is Night Watch (Russian: Ночной дозор, Nochnoy Dozor) a fantasy novel by Russian writer Sergei Lukyanenko:

…”The story revolves around a confrontation between two opposing supernatural groups (known as “Others”): the Night Watch, an organization dedicated to policing the actions of the Dark Others—and the Day Watch, which polices the actions of the Light Others.”..

Additional story details can draw a speculative parallel between the human reality and the underlying quantum mysteries:

“In the story’s worldline there exists a magical realm beneath the surface of all things—referred to as the Twilight (or Gloom in other translations). The action in the novel centers on a group of people referred to as the Others—human beings who tapped into the Twilight and gained supernormal abilities. The Others were the humans (shamans, soothsayers, and wisemen) from long ago who figured out how to step into the Twilight. However, the Others are different from humans, they are born as Others. Humans are not able (at least in the first part of the tetralogy) to become Others.” .. see here.

The novel was made into a movie in 2004 by by the Kazakhstan-born film director Timur Bekmambetov, see here.

The movie was my visual source for the human side drawings I made in a pseudo comics style. The ‘performed marriage’ on the invitation is best seen in invitation 2 (below) where the left hand side is in pixelike form hinting to the quantum mysteries and the right hand side hint to the human mysteries.

Is it a happy marriage or not ? Where mysteries are involved who knows..