Decoherence – The aesthetics and politics of quantum technologies

Tommaso Callarco (physi­cist), Dietmar Dath (author), Eveliina Domnitch (artist) and Dmitry Gelfand (artist), Libby Heaney (artist), Elham Kashefi (physi­cist), Armin Linke (artist), Volker Möllenhoff (artist), Tomás Saraceno (artist), Carly Whitefield (cura­tor), Günseli Yalcinkaya (artist).

Decoherence is the process where a quan­tum sys­tem los­es its super­po­si­tion, often due to inter­ac­tion with the sur­round­ing envi­ron­ment for instance through mea­sure­ment. It is the moment after quan­tum super­po­si­tion, when a mul­ti-state sys­tem set­tles into a sin­gle, def­i­nite state. Following the col­lapse, the sys­tem exists in an eigen­state.

Current dig­i­tal art’s aes­thet­i­cal pro­gram refers to a struc­tur­al, data­based, and Boolean oper­a­tional­iza­tion of real­i­ty. Slightly dif­fer­ent, arti­fi­cial ‘intel­li­gence’ art emerges from the sta­tis­ti­cal and deriv­a­tive response to an under­ly­ing exam­ple-based data set. Which of these con­di­tions inform quan­tum com­put­ing art, if any at all?

As a tech­nol­o­gy in the mak­ing, quan­tum com­put­ing is in its infan­cy. What can we learn from the recent expe­ri­ences with AI based tech­nolo­gies in order to pre­vent the same monop­o­li­sa­tion of ressources with­in a few cor­po­ra­tions? How can artists respond to Quantum hype dif­fer­ent­ly from how they respond­ed to AI hype? How  does quan­tum computing’s cur­rent con­fig­u­ra­tion as exper­i­men­tal set­up with a need for immense resources allow for access and explo­ration, if at all? Is the solu­tion more access and to what exact­ly?

Quantum vocab­u­lary is also increas­ing­ly used as buzz­word for mil­i­tary start-ups, which simul­ta­ne­ous­ly lean into pseu­do-Eastern new age vibe and promise to defend “Western civil­i­sa­tion”. Military inter­ests are inex­tri­ca­bly linked to quan­tum R&D, when it comes to encryp­tion and sen­sor tech­nol­o­gy. How are quan­tum tech­nolo­gies embed­ded into a trans­for­ma­tion to a mul­ti­po­lar glob­al pow­er sys­tem and the “Zeitenwende” that this entails? How again does this link back to con­tem­po­rary art pro­duc­tion?

July 1, 2026 at Haus der Kunst, Munich, 17–20

July 2, 2026 at Academy of Visual Arts, Munich, Aula, 14–19

Convened by Emergent Digital Media class, Hito Steyerl, Francis Hunger

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with Haus der Kunst, Andrea Lissoni