Quantum Memories - Probability A, 2020, Refik Anadol Studio
Data Sculpture
Custom software, quantum computing data, generative algorithm with artificial intelligence (AI), real time digital animation on LED screen, 4 channel sound
16 minute loop edition 2 of 5
Los Angeles-based Refik Anadol Studio creates public art that explores the potential for intersections of media, science, and technology to radically communicate data while also inviting audiences to visualize alternate architectures of space and perception. Through site-specific immersive installations, data paintings, and audio/visual performances, Refik Anadol Studio takes the invisible data that surrounds us as primary material and the computerized mind as collaborator, to create unique poetic experiences.
The studio focuses on space, especially as it relates to the domains of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and architecture. It seeks to re-consider dialogic relationships between imagination and physicality, self and environment, technology and history. By merging these fields within the context of public art, the studio draws attention to the construction and recollection of our histories, memories, and dreams and in so doing finds the resources to encapsulate our interconnectedness (1).
Quantum Memories utilizes the most cutting-edge, Google AI’s publicly available quantum computation research data and algorithms to explore the possibility of a parallel world by processing approximately 200 million nature and landscape images through artificial intelligence. These algorithms allow us to speculate alternative modalities inside the most sophisticated computer available, and create new quantum noise-generated datasets as building blocks of these modalities. The 3D visual piece is accompanied by an audio experience that is also based on quantum noise–generated data, offering an immersive experience that further challenges the notion of mutual exclusivity. The project is both inspired by and a speculation of the Many-Worlds Interpretation in quantum physics – a theory that holds that there are many parallel worlds that exist at the same space and time as our own.
Tapping into the random fluctuations of quantum noise as a unique realm of possibilities and predictions, Quantum Memories provides an interactive aesthetic experience by tracking the audience’s movements in real-time and simulating how their observer positions indeed become entangled with the visible outcomes of the ever-changing artwork. (2)