“THE ENVIRONMENT AS A WITNESS.”- W. ZUREK.

I remember having read a book by SF author Greg Egan named “Quarantine” where incredible things occur: …

“This mod allows the user to stop being an observer in the sense of quantum mechanics and consequently to “smear”, i.e. to exist in a superposition of different states at the same time and to pick eigenstates of personal preference from the range of possible states, when the personal wave function is collapsed.”….see here.,

This seems a little bit perplexing if meanwhile not feasible, but is actually a good start to no lesser perplexing matters like the following story..

…I always asked myself what is there beyond the things I am witnessing in my everyday life? Or perhaps… am I being witnessed by some dark force, you know those monsters looking at you from the nowhere darkness, for whom I am their everyday life..

Apparently there are such little monsters, they are named photons not looming from the darkness but creating light. They are the true members of the  ‘quantum mechanics’ theory and they look and monitor  me from my birth until my last  breath.

Now what has  this  Film Noir preamble to do with my future exhibition at the Kibbutz Gallery in Tel Aviv?

Well it has. By some metaphorical magic, if  my drawings and prints  are to have a meaning about the emerging  of my mother Gitel into my everyday life and about their emerging before your eyes as visitors in the gallery, then the exhibition “Mother as an Imprint on the Environment” has to point to the underpinning weirdness named decoherence, telling us how such an appearance is made possible with the help of those  little monsters.

To put us in the mood of what these little photon monsters do, I quote from the article  “Decoherence is our ticket out of the quantum world”  published in 1999, see here,  giving the big picture of this emerging in a nutshell :

…” ‘We live in a sea of photons, for example, and interact with some small fraction of them. So the environment is in some sense in a constant process of monitoring objects,’ Zurek said… …’Decoherence provides a menu of allowed states; it’s a selection process that disallows flagrantly quantum states of macroscopic objects,’ Zurek said.”…

W. Zurek one of the most  prominent theoretical physicist is trying to elucidate the weirdness of the  transition from the quantum world to our everyday classical world. He  propose a very captivating view,  where the little quantum monsters  as the mysterious agents of  quantum physics cause our apparent  perception of reality, and  in particular, how and why I perceive my mother Gitel after her ‘transition from the quantum-to-classical world’…a very weird phrase for describing her motherly earthiness..,  for more see here

So if I take his words for granted then my mother, as a macroscopic person (state), cannot be in a quantum state of many possibilities and indeed, without to much surprise, I see her definitely classically as photos and prints in one place and not in a paranoid simultaneous two place position.

….. From here on, with the help of an amnesiac state of mind and  with some extrapolation I imagined and imaged a metaphorical  quantum-to-classical voyage with the benevolent help of the underpinning  decoherence story,  depicting the  transition of my quantum mother to her earthly classical mother form.

So,  the whole thing lives now in about 45  drawings and prints on paper made with inkjet printer, pencils, colors and other accessories..  look at the following pictures as a sample:

To view the full images, please qlick on the pictures,

Mother in a flagrant superposition of  two of her possible states,,, reduced to classical pencils paper ocher…prints states.

…. my young mother beyond my everyday life depicted in a sea of  little photon monsters, presumably in one of her possible quantum states  and being monitored by the yellow head until instantly she decohere into a classical definitive state…… reduced to Rives print paper, inkjet colors, monitor pixels as representing the little photon monsters…

…. And finally mother emerge in my classical everyday classical life….Photos, 110 year old, from my mother in Zdunska Wola in Poland. Sepia color, staged in the light of a real gallery in Tel Aviv.

‘Bon Voyage’…