BARAD complex I
quantum cabinet : electromagnetic peepshow
double slit experiment - an enactment of virtual virtuality, 2022
in the context of "Ortstermin 22" by Galerie Nord, Berlin
with financial support of NEUSTART KULTUR, Stiftung Kunstfonds
fake wall, slits, prepared ventilator, light
The visual phenomenon is created by analogue means in real time. There is no pre-made projection or digital processing involved.
What would it be like if we could directly observe quants and their crazy behaviour... if we could hear, smell, touch and taste them?
How different would our ideas about the world and the nature of its liveliness be?
And how much queerer our thinking...
"What could be more queer than an atom? And I don’t just mean strange. The very nature of an atom’s being, its very identity, is indeterminacy itself."
"There seemed to be something queer about the quantum from the beginning. Or rather, it became evident from the start that the quantum causes trouble for the very notion of ‘from the beginning’."
"Quantum signifies the ‘smallest possible, and therefore indivisible, unit of a given quantity or quantifiable phenomenon’ (Cassidy). It is a measure of the discreteness of nature."
"Particles are given to fits, to paroxysms, to spasmodic bouts of e-motion or activity."
"All this ‘quantum weirdness’ (the display of an increasing array of uncanny phenomena) is actually ‘quantum queerness,’ and I don’t mean simply strange. Q is for queer – the un/doing of identity." Identity undone by a discontinuity at the heart of matter itself."
"The quantum dis/continuity queers the very notion of differentiating. It offers a much-needed rethinking of ac/counting, taking account, and accountability that isn’t derivative of some fixed notion of identity or even a fixed interval or origin."
"...how electrons experience the world: that is, a dis/orienting experience of the dis/jointedness of time and space, entanglements of here and there, now and then, a ghostly sense of dis/continuity, a quantum dis/continuity, which is neither fully discontinuous with continuity or even fully continuous with discontinuity, and in any case, surely not one with itself."
