“Concerning the Quantum in Art” is a nod to Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1 The substitution indexes the connection between what are, ipso facto, entirely unrelated qualities. Yet, the absence of absolutes in quantum mechanics provides a more fertile space for the impossible—such as clairvoyance, the occult, chance, serendipity and fate. Various alternative spiritual groups have appropriated quantum theory to support dubious claims, using its uncertainties and probabilities to legitimise their beliefs. Quantum theory offers an appearance of truth that embraces possibility, probability and uncertainty, but only at the submolecular level. This parallels the artist’s quest to capture a sense of reality, which, as we’ve noted, can never be fully grasped. It dismantles the idea of absolutes and frees us from relying on analogies, metaphors and paradoxes as the primary frameworks for contextualising art.
“Concerning the Quantum in Art” is a nod to Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1 The substitution indexes the connection between what are, ipso facto, entirely unrelated qualities. Yet, the absence of absolutes in quantum mechanics provides a more fertile space for the impossible—such as clairvoyance, the occult, chance, serendipity and fate. Various alternative spiritual groups have appropriated quantum theory to support dubious claims, using its uncertainties and probabilities to legitimise their beliefs. Quantum theory offers an appearance of truth that embraces possibility, probability and uncertainty, but only at the submolecular level. This parallels the artist’s quest to capture a sense of reality, which, as we’ve noted, can never be fully grasped. It dismantles the idea of absolutes and frees us from relying on analogies, metaphors and paradoxes as the primary frameworks for contextualising art.
For half a dozen years, the two of us have taught “The Quantum Moment,” a course on the impact of quantum mechanics on culture and thought. The impact on art is one key topic of this course, and we discuss several different ways in which art of the quantum moment is intertwined with mathematics. Much of this has to do with various mathematical consequences of the fundamental quantum equation E = hν, which by various paths is responsible for complementarity, randomness, uncertainty, and alternate worlds, among other features that have shown up in art. Sometimes the connection to mathematics involves reimaginations, sometimes transformations and reconstructions, sometimes metaphors, and sometimes mere evocations. On the one hand there are incredibly precise and reproducible patterns, of which the earliest may have been spectrum of a hydrogen atom treated as a non-relativistic system. On the other hand, there are the random results of particle observations, such as the locations of strikes of individual photons in a diffraction pattern, which nevertheless in the limit of large numbers of photons becomes extremely precise and regular. Thus quantum mechanics, as well as the art it inspires, has a richness that invites us to expect a substantial future for artistic expressions of The Quantum Moment.
The article explores parallels between quantum evolution and developments taking place in the fine arts. Chance, uncertainty, probability, and intuition are all hallmarks of expression across the fields of both art and scientific practice. The role of the observer in art and science is explored through a comparative study between the act of fine art drawing and quantum measurement. What is meant by the role of the observer to the very act of seeing. The observer draws away a veil of inadequacy in looking for reality. The article reflects on the process of drawing’s comparative relationship the role of the observer in art and science. This role of the observer is analysed in relation to delayed choice quantum erasure, probability, indeterminacy, counterfactual definitiveness, entanglement, superposition, and the classical quantum divide, through the artist’s act of mark-making. There is a need for an attentive gaze when confronting so-called truths. Intentional repositioning and reframing of science practices through art can promote exploration of different ways of visualising, perceiving, understanding, communicating, and acting in the material world. In so doing the article describes a “quantum drawing” workshop created for art and science practitioners. The workshop is a new model for facilitating a transdisciplinary development of alternative domains and discourses that garner insights from the act of seeing and understanding. The workshop explores visual expression, material interaction and embodied practices speculating on quantum intuition, quantum computing and infinite speed. The article defines the quantisation of drawing as a tool for unpacking the role of the observer in art and science to embrace uncertainty.
The word 'uncertainty', in the context of quantum mechanics, usually evokes an impression of an essential unknowability of what might actually be going on at the quantum level of activity, as is made explicit in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and in the fact that the theory normally provides only probabilities for the results of quantum measurement. These issues limit our ultimate understanding of the behaviour of things, if we take quantum mechanics to represent an absolute truth. But they do not cause us to put that very 'truth' into question. This article addresses the issue of quantum 'uncertainty' from a different perspective, raising the question of whether this term might be applied to the theory itself, despite its unrefuted huge success over an enormously diverse range of observed phenomena. There are, indeed, seeming internal contradictions in the theory that lead us to infer that a total faith in it at all levels of scale leads us to almost fantastical implications.
[I] think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law Quantum mechanics [is] that mysterious, confusing discipline, which none of us really understands but which we know how to use. It works perfectly, as far as we can tell, in describing physical reality, but it is a ‘counter-intuitive discipline’… Murray Gell-Mann, Questions for the Future [The quantum] postulate implies a renunciation as regards the causal space-time co-ordination of atomic processes. Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature It should be emphasized, however, that the probability function does not in itself represent a course of events in the course of time. It represents a tendency for events and our knowledge of events. The probability function can be connected with reality only if one essential condition is fulfilled: if a new measurement is made to determine a certain property of the system. [T]he idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them…is impossible … Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy [In] quantum theory it is the principle of causality , or more accurately that of determinism , which must be dropped and replaced by something else.… We now have a new form of the law of causality.… It is as follows: if in a certain process the initial conditions are determined as accurately as the uncertainty relations permit, then the probabilities of all possible subsequent states are governed by exact laws. Max Born, The Restless Universe
Art has the remarkable capacity to reveal things previously unrecognisable until they emerge visually, allowing us to accept new images and expand our ability to interpret the world. Such images become additions to the mental archive we use to recognise and understand our surroundings. Imagining something entirely new is, perhaps, altogether impossible insofar as our understanding is rooted in mental models we compare with external images. When it comes to quantum theory, for instance, we struggle to find any existing schema in our reliquary of mental images to draw from—with attempts to visualise quantum phenomena frequently creating only greater confusion as we try to make sense of its novel qualities within more traditional frameworks. An artwork expressing something unfamiliar about the world can challenge viewers to expand their canvas of consciousness, welcoming new possibilities. By attentively examining a work of art, we can sidestep preconceptions that might otherwise cast the unknown as alien. Art invites us to ask, “What sensations does this image offer me? What gift is it extending?”
This paper offers a philosophical examination of the limits of human access to absolute truth, proposing that the primary constraint does not lie in external reality but in the structure of human intention itself. Drawing conceptually from quantum mechanics—particularly ideas associated with superposition and collapse—the paper argues that intention precedes observation and functions as the determining mechanism through which potential states are reduced to singular, experienced outcomes. The central thesis suggests that complete and undistorted truth cannot be fully perceived without dissolving the very mechanism that enables perception and interaction. If truth were accessed in its totality, the process of collapse would cease, along with the dynamic structure of reality as experienced by human consciousness. Reality, therefore, is presented not as direct truth, but as a necessary and continuous distortion produced by intentional perception. The paper further explores the philosophical consequences of this framework, including the impossibility of total truth-perception within lived existence, the role of intention as an invisible boundary between human consciousness and absolute reality, and the implications for life, death, and meaning. Life is framed as an ongoing search for truth, while death is interpreted as the attainment of truth beyond the constraints of intentional collapse. This work is non-empirical and interpretive in nature. Quantum concepts are employed as philosophical analogies rather than physical claims. The paper is intended to contribute to discussions in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, consciousness studies, and interdisciplinary dialogues between science and philosophy.