An Aesthetic In Thespirit Of The Quantum

Ivan C. H. Liu, Hsiao-Yuan Chen

Quantum mechanics occupies a central position in contemporary science while remaining largely inaccessible to direct sensory experience. This paper proposes a roadmap to quantum aesthetics that examines how quantum concepts become aesthetic phenomena through artistic mediation rather than direct representation. Two complementary and orthogonal approaches are articulated. The first, a pioneering top-down approach, employs text-prompt-based generative AI to probe quantum aesthetics as a collective cultural construct embedded in large-scale training data. By systematically modulating the linguistic weight of the term "quantum," generative models are used as experimental environments to reveal how quantum imaginaries circulate within contemporary visual culture. The second, a bottom-up approach, derives aesthetic form directly from quantum-mechanical structures through the visualization of quantum-generated data, exemplified here by hydrogen atomic orbitals calculated from the Schrödinger equation. These approaches are framed not as competing methods but as intersecting paths within a navigable field of artistic research. They position quantum aesthetics as an emergent field of artistic research shaped by cultural imagination, computational mediation, and physical law, opening new directions for artistic practice and pedagogy at the intersection of art, data, artificial intelligence and quantum science.

E. Brézin

Philip VAN LOOCKE

A cellular automaton that includes some principles from quantum theory is considered. The automaton generates forms of an aesthetic nature. At every time step, a form grows with a single cell. This cell is selected with a selection probability that is determined by an amplitude. If the algorithm is run with selection of the cell of maximal amplitude at every time step, a type of form results that is called'platonic'. Such forms typically have higher aesthetic complexity than their non-platonic counterparts. The case of selection probabilities determined by squares of amplitudes has a strong analogy with quantum theory. This analogy is elaborated by consideration of forms that have mutual correlations. These correlations can be of a classical nature, of a quantum mechanical type, or of a type that is termed'super-correlation'.

Alain Lioret

Fabian Offert

The idea of quantum simulation, first conceived by Richard Feynman in his influential 1982 lecture "Simulating Physics with Computers" [Feynman 1982], introduced a peculiar new way of thinking about the relationship between the material and the symbolic. In this paper1, I examine the conceptual and aesthetic implications of quantum simulation by reading Feynman's lecture with Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic theory. I argue that quantum simulation, as it requires nothing less than the simulated to become the fabric of the simulation, actively symbolizes the material---not by referencing it but by transforming it into an actual symbolic system that exists in the real world, like the electric charges that do not represent but are our thoughts in the realm of the material. The very notion of quantum simulation can thus be understood to be in a state of conceptual superposition---which is, at its core, an aesthetic principle.