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), Tamiko Thiel (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?

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

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with Haus der Kunst, Andrea Lissoni

Graphic Design: Anja Kaiser https://www.instagram.com/aeni.kaiser/

Biographies

Dietmar Dath

Dietmar Dath is a writer, jour­nal­ist, and trans­la­tor. He was edi­tor-in-chief of the pop cul­ture mag­a­zine “Spex” and works as author and edi­tor for the arts and cul­ture sec­tion of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. His non-fic­tion book “Niegeschichte”, pub­lished by Matthes & Seitz in 2019, explores the sci­ence fic­tion genre across 1000 pages. The same pub­lish­er released his cur­rent nov­el “Skyrmionen Oder: A Fucking Army”, of sim­i­lar length, about lan­guage and tech­nol­o­gy. His nov­els have been trans­lat­ed into English, Italian, and Korean, and his work has received numer­ous awards; most recent­ly, he was award­ed the Alfred Kerr Prize for Literary Criticism at the Leipzig Book Fair this year.

Tommaso Calarco

Prof. Calarco pio­neered quan­tum opti­mal con­trol in quan­tum com­pu­ta­tion and many-body sys­tems. He earned his PhD at the University of Ferrara and was a post­doc with Peter Zoller at the University of Innsbruck. In 2004, he became Senior Researcher at the BEC Centre in Trento and Professor of Physics at the University of Ulm in 2007, lat­er direct­ing the Institute for Complex Quantum Systems and the Centre for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology. He also con­duct­ed research at NIST and Harvard. Author of the Quantum Manifesto ini­ti­at­ing the EU Quantum Flagship, he now co-chairs its Quantum Community Network, serves as Secretary of the EC expert group on quan­tum tech­nolo­gies, and co-found­ed the European Quantum Industry Consortium (QuIC).

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand cre­ate mul­ti­sen­so­ry instal­la­tions and per­for­mances that merge the phys­i­cal sci­ences with uncan­ny philo­soph­i­cal prac­tices. Investigating ques­tions of per­cep­tion and per­pe­tu­ity, their art­works exist as ever-trans­form­ing phe­nom­e­na offered for obser­va­tion. The imme­di­a­cy of this expe­ri­ence allows the observ­er to tran­scend the illu­so­ry dis­tinc­tion between sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery and per­cep­tu­al expan­sion.

The duo’s prac­tice has emerged through col­lab­o­ra­tions with pio­neer­ing research groups, includ­ing LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), EU Quantum Flagship, and Aerospace Engineering (TU Delft). They are recip­i­ents of the Witteveen+Bos Award (2019), Meru Art*Science Award (2018), and Japan Media Arts Excellence Prize (2007).

Libby Heaney

Dr. Libby Heaney is a work­ing class, award win­ning artist with a PhD and pro­fes­sion­al back­ground in Quantum Science. She is the first artist to work with quan­tum com­put­ing, begin­ning in 2019.

Heaney’s prac­tice explores the inher­ent­ly non-bina­ry and hybrid con­cepts and tem­po­ral­i­ties of quan­tum physics. She com­bines diverse media such as vir­tu­al real­i­ty, video games and mov­ing image with cut­ting-edge tech­nolo­gies like AI and quan­tum com­put­ing and tra­di­tion­al media such as water­colour, glass and most recent­ly pub­lic sculp­ture. Together these media cre­ate a dream-like aes­thet­ic, ask­ing big philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions about the nature of real­i­ty while remain­ing very human — inti­mate and embod­ied.

Elham Kashefi

Kashefi has pio­neered trans­dis­ci­pli­nary research on quan­tum com­put­ing tech­nol­o­gy, from for­mal foun­da­tions to indus­tri­al use-case deliv­ery. She co-found­ed the fields of secure quan­tum cloud com­put­ing and quan­tum ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Her research inte­grates soft­ware (sim­u­la­tion, mod­el­ling, ver­i­fi­ca­tion) across diverse hard­ware plat­forms, deliv­er­ing cer­ti­fi­able impact in quan­tum com­put­ing (machine learn­ing, crypt­analy­sis) and quan­tum net­works (quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy). Recipient of EPSRC Advanced and Established Career Fellowships, the French Margaret Intrapreneur Award (2021), and elect­ed Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2024).

Tamiko Thiel

Tamiko Thiel received the 2024 SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement in Digital Arts Award and is in the AWE XR Hall of Fame for over 40 years of media art­works illu­mi­nat­ing nat­ur­al, tech­no­log­i­cal, social and cul­tur­al sys­tems. She encoun­tered quan­tum physics as a stu­dent 1974–1976 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, but detoured into prod­uct design, work­ing from 1983–1985 with Nobel QED physi­cist Richard Feynman on the Connection Machines, the first com­mer­cial AI super­com­put­ers. In 2025 the ERES Foundation com­mis­sioned her to work with quan­tum physi­cists to cre­ate the immer­sive expe­ri­ence ParadoQc/Machines (with /p) — and dis­cov­ered Feynman had been writ­ing the sem­i­nal paper on quan­tum com­put­ing, first sim­u­lat­ing it in 1985 on a Connection Machine.

Tomás Saraceno

Tomás Saraceno (b. 1973) is an Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist whose projects devise plat­forms for ecoso­cial, par­tic­i­pa­to­ry, and installa­tive encoun­ters, that host and ampli­fy regen­er­a­tive forms of knowl­edge. Connecting across scales and spec­tra, his work—and the trans­dis­ci­pli­nary com­mu­ni­ties he has found­ed, includ­ing Museo Aero Solar (2007–), the Aerocene Foundation (2015–) and Arachnophilia (2018–)—builds bridges of ‘response-abil­i­ty’ that seek to move audi­ences towards deep­er reci­procity and attune­ment with oth­er beings in the web(s) of life.

Saraceno has exhib­it­ed inter­na­tion­al­ly at major insti­tu­tions. His work has fea­tured at the Venice Biennale (2009, 2019, 2020) and UN Climate Change Conferences (COP20, COP21, COP26), and is rep­re­sent­ed in lead­ing col­lec­tions, includ­ing MoMA, New York; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the National Gallery of Denmark.

Carly Whitefield

Carly Whitefield is a cura­tor cur­rent­ly work­ing as Head of Programme at LAS Art Foundation, Berlin. Since join­ing LAS in 2023, she has curat­ed the projects Natasha Tontey: The Phantom Combatants (2026), Pierre Huyghe: Liminals (2026), Laure Prouvost: WE FELT A STAR DYING (2025), Josèfa Ntjam: swell of spæc(i)es (2024), Lawrence Lek: NOX (2023), Marianna Simnett: GORGON (2023), and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: Pollinator Pathmaker (2023–26). She pre­vi­ous­ly worked as Assistant Curator, International Art, at Tate Modern, London, where she spe­cialised in time-based media and North American art.

Günseli Yalcinkaya

Günseli Yalcinkaya is an artist, writer and researcher based in London, whose work explores how tech­nol­o­gy shapes myth. A writer-in-res­i­dence at Somerset House Studios and for­mer External Research Associate at Moth Quantum, Günseli inves­ti­gates inter­net folk­lore, track­ing how emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies – from AI to quan­tum com­put­ing – give rise to new ide­olo­gies, dig­i­tal super­sti­tions and col­lec­tive fan­tasies. Her writ­ing has appeared in Art Review, CURA, Dazed Magazine, Spike Art and 032c, among oth­ers. Her research into quan­tum cul­ture was ini­tial­ly pre­sent­ed as part of LAS Art Foundation’s Sensing Art pro­gramme. As a mem­ber of the mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary audio­vi­su­al project The Talk, she col­lab­o­rates with musi­cian and Heith and archi­tect Andrea Belosi, trans­form­ing research into live per­for­mance.