Description
2025, 1920 x 1080 pixels, 00:00:43
The world is not a Turing machine, a perfect logical computation machine. In the quantum (subatomic) realm the Aristotelian logic of true and false, yes and no becomes fuzzy. One taps into an ocean of potentialities and possibilities, analogous to Alice and Wonderland. When looking at or listening to quantum fluctuations, we dive even deeper into the presumably lowest energy state — or substrate — of the universe.
In this liminal zone between certainty and chaos, we glimpse that the universe does not “compute” in the way classical machines do. Rather, it intra-acts. The apparatuses we deploy, and the questions we ask, co-constitute the phenomena that emerge. This is the lesson of Bohr’s complementarity, extended and refracted in Karen Barad’s agential realism, that matter and meaning are not separate ontological domains but are entangled in a material-discursive becoming.
It is precisely in this not-quite-deterministic field that the Quantum Time and Flower series (2025) by De Wilde intervenes. The work does not merely represent quantum indeterminacy — it embeds it as generative matter.
De Wilde’s Quantum Time and Flower series (2025) explores the interactions and energy exchanges that transpire at subatomic scales across infinitesimal intervals of time. But this is not a poetic allegory of quantum physics — the works are literally derived from live quantum data.
Using a tabletop laser apparatus with entangled photons, De Wilde harvested a stream of raw random numbers grounded in actual quantum fluctuation. That data — energy measurements, timing intervals, probabilistic amplitudes — was channeled online into a bespoke software pipeline that generated parametric 3D models, which were later materialized into sculptural forms or images in “flower-time” motifs.
In doing so, the artist enacts a radical inversion; rather than imposing human aesthetic form onto matter, the matter itself (in its irreducible randomness) contributes to the aesthetic form. The boundary between measurement apparatus, artist, and artwork dissolves; the “flower” is not an imposed metaphor so much as a crystallization of quantum difference itself.
If De Wilde’s work gestures to the generative promise of quantum indeterminacy, it also invites a sober reflection: what kinds of futures do we cultivate when we engineer at the quantum scale? The quantum computer, once fully realized, promises transformative capacities — but also deep existential risks.
In short, a fully operational quantum computer would not only threaten the stability of the world—it might reorder it. The question then becomes: What kinds of worlds do we design (or allow) to grow? What kind of flower do we want to see bloom?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Frederik de Wilde is a Belgium artist working at the intersection of art, science, technology, and design. His practice explores the inaudible, intangible, and invisible in digital and physical spaces, critically engaging with the societal and environmental shifts driven by technology. De Wilde’s work navigates speculative futures and complex systems, offering innovative perspectives on contemporary challenges. Frederik is best known for his Blackest-Black nano-engineered artworks (2010), developed with Rice University and NASA.