The Turner Prize-winning artist’s We Felt A Star Dying, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, brings together musicians, philosophers, and scientists to imagine where quantum technologies might take us
The old Mitte power plant – a vast concrete structure with towering chimneys and a cavernous turbine hall – was built around the same time as the Berlin Wall, and once supplied energy and heat to East Berlin. For the next few months, though, the French artist Laure Prouvost has transformed its industrial interior into a kind of alternate reality. Strange, semi-organic creatures glide through the space to an ambient, thrumming soundscape by KUKII. Pulses and flashes of light reveal the giant, floating limbs of a timeless megafauna, a “quantum presence” born in the Big Bang.
For Prouvost, each of the beings that populates We Felt A Star Dying is entwined with every other part of the universe, including ourselves. “We are we – you, me, everybody as one,” she says at the opening of the show. “This was really the anthem of this piece. There’s no you.”
Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, the exhibition marks the launch of its new Sensing Quantum programme, which challenges artists, scientists, and thinkers to collaborate on responses to the emerging field of quantum computing – i.e. building computers based on phenomena described by quantum mechanics, a 100-year-old field pioneered by the likes of Erwin Schrödinger (the cat guy).
In this case, Prouvost worked with the philosopher Tobias Rees and Hartmut Neven, a quantum scientist at Google and founder of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab. “You’re merging different worlds, bringing different minds together,” explains LAS CEO and co-founder Bettina Kames, of the collaboration. In practice, Prouvost took on the role of translator, transforming abstract ideas, theories, and frameworks into tangible images and sensory experiences – no easy task.
Quantum mechanics – and, by extension, quantum computing – is notoriously difficult to explain. Even among experts, who’ve dedicated their life to studying physics, it’s generally regarded as the point where humans’ understanding of the universe starts to really fall apart, and our deepest intuitions no longer describe reality. It tells us that two particles can directly and instantaneously affect each others’ behaviour, even if they’re at opposite ends of the universe (known as ‘entanglement’). It tells us that an object can exist in multiple states or places at once (‘superposition’).
This unintuitive theory also underpins quantum computing; whereas a normal computer communicates in 0s and 1s, known as bits, a quantum computer’s basic unit is a ‘qubit’, which can exist in a superposition of all possible states at once. In theory, this makes them capable of processing incredibly complex computations over a much shorter time.
[Quantum processes] break with some of the most basic forms of experiencing and understanding reality – Tobias Rees
Quantum processes “break with some of the most basic forms of experiencing and understanding reality that have defined the modern period,” writes Rees. “Things were either natural or technical; either alive or non-living; either human or machine; either being or thing. The beauty of quantum processes is that they are discontinuous with these binaries.”
Prouvost approached this boundaryless, uncertain universe with a “very playful, sensitive” spirit, Kames recalls, over years of discussions and experiments with rare quantum technologies. Channelled through her unique artistic sensibility – which has previously seen her win the 2013 Turner Prize, and represent France at the Venice Biennale – qubits become ‘cute-bits’: metallic, alien creatures whose hollowed-out bodies are filled with grasses and crawling with insects. The concept of entanglement is physically manifested in their synchronised movements, while the metallic and mineral smells of the technosphere fill wearable cute-bit ‘helmets’. Elsewhere, the title of the show itself references the sensitivity of quantum computers (which can be disrupted by something as far away as a star collapsing in deep space) and is embodied in a film of the same name, which fluctuates between original footage and images distorted by ‘quantum noise’.
In a nondescript side room off Kraftwerk’s turbine hall, Prouvost illustrates the sensitivity of quantum computers with a story about the California wildfires. The machines could sense the heat from the fires despite being tucked away in Google’s quantum computing lab, she explains, and qubits began to “misbehave” or malfunction. “It’s close to an animal, like a cat running because the fire’s too close. It’s close to subjectivity.” The qubits’s reactivity also added an element of randomness into the art-making process (lighting and sound designer Sam Belinfante notes the influence of figures like John Cage, who famously composed music using chance operations with ‘tools’ like the I Ching).
Given the project’s collaborative approach, and Prouvost’s recurring anthem – “We are we” – could it also be said that the quantum computer, a “feeling” machine, took on the shape of another collaborator for the human artists? “For the music, it definitely did,” says KUKII. Shortly after her initial conversation with Prouvost, the musician seized the rare opportunity to feed “a bunch” of (primarily Eastern) music into a quantum computer. “It was very exciting. It was like making a playlist for the Moon because it had never been fed this [music]... definitely not any of the stuff that I fed it.” What came back was run through another round of experimentation, via AI, and this resulted in the main theme for the show. KUKII then sang alongside the computer-generated track, and composed new music around the melody: “So it was back and forth the whole time.”
It’s magical... I love this moment where you lose control – Laure Prouvost
When it comes to the visuals, Prouvost agrees that it felt like the technology “actually had its own agency”. “It was hard to know how to collaborate with it, in the beginning,” she adds, and it’s still unclear how it might reach its full potential in an artistic sense. As with AI, there will undoubtedly be some scepticism about the loss of creative agency to quantum technologies as well, as they become more widespread, but for Prouvost, this is the most “magical” aspect of working with quantum. “I love this moment where you lose control, and then get it back. You can have a real discussion with it.”
All of these conversations are taking place against a backdrop of rapid quantum innovation. The day before Kraftwerk opened its doors for We Felt A Star Dying, Microsoft announced a new quantum chip, Majorana 1, built with a novel material that can generate a whole new state of matter: neither solid, liquid or gas. The technology company says it expects the chip to drive the creation of less fragile quantum computers, “capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades”. A couple of months earlier, Google unveiled a quantum chip named Willow, which reportedly performed a benchmark task that would have taken a ‘regular’ supercomputer ten septillion years – much longer than the age of the universe – in under five minutes.
This doesn’t mean that quantum computing is right around the corner. But, like AI before it, the dawning technology implies a number of disruptive and unpredictable futures, which humanity will need to face with an open mind. In this sense, we might look at the creation of Prouvost’s quantum cosmos as a kind of blueprint: more than ever, perhaps, we need artists to teach us how to move through the world in a more intuitive, even naïve, way – to find find moments of tangible beauty in an ocean of uncertainty. It’s also a moment that requires a willingness to “unlearn” what we know, Belinfante suggests: “What is it like to be a baby before you even cry? You have to destabilise everything, in order for these new feelings to come out.”
“Having no words for things, it’s wonderful,” Prouvost concludes.
We Felt A Star Dying is on show at Kraftwerk in Berlin until May 4.