Tag Archives: quantum
A New Art Vocabulary
MY TRANSITION FROM “QUANTUM” . TO . CLASSICAL 
The Big Data Show
Aviva Ori is an Israeli visual artist (1922-1989) …. Prof. Yuval Harari is a contemporary Israeli historian (1976 ….). Paraphrasing on an interview with him on Wired, maybe in the near future “Big Data” will be the visual artist …I will be redundant
….But both (Yuval Harari, Aviva Ori) and myself (the redundant visual artist) are manufactured on the backstage of the quantum world where the Very Big Data has his ultimate life show.
Three Classical Prophets manufactured in the Quantum backstage
Prophets with Feynman diagrams….
Jeremiah…
Ezekiel..
Deborah..
My “Complementarity Principle”
..From a conventional point of view, as a visual artist perceiving a classical world (not quantum), my occupation, as a picture maker, is simply to put things together to make art (for whatever that is)..So here below is a picture I create and named “My “complementary principle“”….. So what has Art to do with Complementary which is a quantum concept ?
Portrait of a kibbutz member
Particle…………………………………..and…………………………………Wave
Well, I will go straight to the point. The Danish physicist Bohr one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics coined the word “complementary” meaning among others: particle and wave, (There is more to that..) Well as a fan of Science Fiction, seeking after a connection between art and quantum mechanics, I found the following text: “From Cubist Simultaneity to Quantum Complementarity by” Christophe Schinckus.
The abstract says:
“This article offers a contribution to the history of scientific ideas by proposing an epistemological argument supporting the assumption made by Miller whereby Niels Bohr has been influenced by cubism (Jean Metzinger) when he developed his non-intuitive complementarity principle. More specifically, this essay will identify the Bergsonian durée as the conceptual bridge between Metzinger and Bohr. Beyond this conceptual link between the painter and the physicist [etc…].” ...See here for the full text.
So…I the visual artist looking after a connection between me and the weird quantum mechanics… and he, Niels Bohr the prize Nobel physicist, doing the same in reverse, as by Miller’s assumption, was influenced by cubism (Jean Metzinger) when he developed his non-intuitive complementarity principle….??
Today it is common practice that some scientists are also artist and that a minority of artist are very curious about quantum mechanics’s potential to make art.. (See here) So for me it’s not an unusual coincidence…
Now, I presume that I am 95% classical (not quantum) in every day mode. I perceive science and my own art making on the same epistemic and ontological footing: they share together the same Newtonian space and time (for all practical purpose) and share Einsteins Relativity for light speed, not very practical in my atelier… but my above picture’s name point to the fact that I somehow mentioned my quantum attributes: particle (myself) + wave (myself) in my ordinary every day life..Is it factually correct? Or is it Science Fiction like the movies “Interstellar” and “Blade Runner 2049…………….
The 95% classical and 5% quantum appearance of myself and Noah
Let’s see, I quote from the article: “Scientists take next step towards observing quantum physics in real life”
..”Small objects like electrons and atoms behave according to quantum mechanics, with quantum effects like superposition, entanglement and teleportation. One of the most intriguing questions in modern science is if large objects – like a coffee cup – could also show this behavior. Scientists at the TU Delft have taken the next step towards observing quantum effects at everyday temperatures in large objects. They created a highly reflective membrane, visible to the naked eye, that can vibrate with hardly any energy loss at room temperature. The membrane is a promising candidate to research quantum mechanics in large objects.” Read more at...
Now I am a large object like the coffee cup, so there is in me some leftovers of quantumness ..that I can not see and feel but that I can imagine in the same way Rene Magritte’s painting “This is not a pipe” or in the “My Quantum Complementarity” picture.
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To resume…Remembering that the majority of artist, galleries, art schools, museums, critics, curators, art magazines, lives in the explicit classical world (non quantum), don’t raise the question of why we live in a classical world that perhaps implicitly is manufactured in the quantum world does not mean that our every day perceptions are absolute. And more to that, that new “visual concepts” on the verge of science fiction can factually be create taking into account the “implicit” back stage of the quantum weirdness.
So the whole above story, my be condensed in a few words “The Translation from the Quantum (microscopic weird world) to the Classical (our old good world)” implies that without the quantum back stage there is no old good world… and that the art world with her whole machinery artist, galleries, art schools, museums, critics, curators, art magazines, is included in and comes from the quantum….so what can a curious visual artist (me) do with that… if not make another art closer to a more fundamental “reality”. Our own good old reality being perhaps only an approximation an average (like temperature)….Its fun.
The sum over histories of my life
MONITORING MY IMPRINT ON THE ENVIRONMENT IN ZDUNSKA WOLA 1941
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“MY IMPRINT ON THE ENVIRONMENT IN ZDUNSKA WOLA 1941” refers to a fact in quantum physics called decoherence. The sentence “My imprint on the environment” is attributed to Zurek, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, I quote:
“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. see here.
And again, speaking about Hyperion an odd-shaped moon of Saturn:
“Hyperion is not isolated,” Zurek pointed out, “it is making an imprint on the environment all the time. So decoherence applies and keeps the moon out of quantum trouble”, see here .
Now what has this to do with “My imprint in Zdunska Wola”… Well, quantum physics is monitoring our whole world and a fortiori my possible imprint in Zdunska Wola 1941. So if viewed through a Science Fiction prism it would be reasonable to think that my own 2012 imprint on the environment could be entangled with events in Zdunska Wola when I was eight year old…
What I feel as personally relevant is that in some “Art Video” way I create the above video clip to preserve otherwise lost remembrances.
Musical credit Michael Wells: http://www.myspace.com/micwellssongs
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..
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Invitation 2 for ” The Environment as a Witness”.
Invitation 3 for ” The Environment as a Witness”.
Invitation 4 for ” The Environment as a Witness”,
N.B.
Israel. Tel Aviv. ‘The Kibbutz, Art Gallery’. The exhibition is through May 14. Curated by Yael Keni. ‘
The Espresso Mode Improvisation
Sometimes a word or a picture triggers a memory deeply entrenched in your brain. The vimeo HD video “ESPRESSO” has the evocative power of recreating flavors and mindsets when drinking an espresso.
Here are a few pictures and drawings improvised from ‘nowhere’..
Before drinking I look ….Click on the picture to see the video.
Colors and smells.. Click on the picture to enlarge.
She don’t like espresso it’s a bad romance… Click on the picture to hear and see Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”.
After effect espresso.. Click on the picture to enlarge.
Gold brown powder is beautiful.. Click on the picture to enlarge.
Fearful espresso.. Click on the picture to enlarge.
The quantum espresso men..
To finish,
To my great dismay, after finishing the pictures ‘decorated’ with the word “Expresso”, I found that the word ‘Espresso‘ is perhaps more adequate. But being to lazy to rework the pictures , I found to my great relief that, I quote:
…”Many Latin based countries, such as France, Spain, and Portugal, use the Expresso form. In the United States and Canada, both espresso and expresso are used. Italy uses the term espresso, substituting most x letters in Latin root words with s; x is not considered part of the standard Italian alphabet.”…see here.
So, coming myself from Europe, I have the strong feeling that I may stick, unpunished, to the word Expresso.
Mother’s Imprint on the Environment
“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’…
