QUANTUM SCULPTURE:

A NEW FORM OF ART

Speaker: Siobhan Tucker on 21 December 1999

The Quantum Potential project, as described in the lecture, was an attempt on the part of those involved to form a collaboration of artists and scientists. As the chronicler of the project, the speaker set out to describe the process and explain the dynamics that led to the creation of the quantum potential sculpture. The talk proceeded chronologically from the first meeting to the present.

The artists Mark Merer and Lucy Glendinning were introduced with visual examples of their work. This was to give the audience a feel for their individual styles; one being large-scale landscape sculpture, the other figurative.

The scientists Dr Chris Philipiddis and Prof. Peter Holland, both eminent in their field, currently work at the University of the West of England. They worked as research students for the famous physicist David Bohm, who proposed the original quantum potential concept in 1952. It was a chance discovery of this work that led Dr Chris Philipiddis to re-calculate the mathematics, and with the aid of computers, produce images of the two-slit quantum potential. It was the aesthetic dimension to these images, and possibly the increasing popularity of art/science projects, that motivated the scientists towards collaboration.

The two-slit experiment has become an icon among experiments, first being proposed as proof that light is a wave phenomenon in 1802 by Thomas Young and then as an illustration of the wave/particle duality once it was established that light is comprised of particles, known as photons. The mystery of the quantum world in the Official Copenhagen Interpretation is that the trajectories of particles proceeding from source to detection point cannot be described in the language of classical physics, therefore, any attempt at describing them was foregone in favour of introducing an uncertainty element into the equations. The Quantum Potential provides a means of visualising those trajectories. It is a description of space on a very small scale. As the shape of the quantum potential is dependent upon the objects in space, the correlation between it and negative space in art was made, and therefore what an exciting prospect it would be for a sculptor to explore.

The talk then moved on to describe the creation of the quantum potential sculpture. It was the result of a response not only to the theory of the concept, but also to a laser light demonstration of the two-slit experiment and a compulsion of the artists to express themselves in their own language. The project needed their input to continue the collaborative process. Completion of the sculpture marked the end of the first phase of the project, more funding was required and it was the preparation of documentation for that purpose that highlighted the differences in interpretation.

The speaker drew attention to the retrospective correlation between the artwork and the scientific concept, a correlation that could be misleading in its deterministic slant. That is, the scientists' interpretation gave the impression that the sculpture was created with the explicit intention of representing the tension between the continuous and discrete in the wave/particle duality. This was not necessarily accurate.

Something else interesting emerged from the documentation, which was the disinclination of the scientists to broadcast their response to questions prompted by the sculpture. Calculations had been done as a result of those questions which, it was reluctantly admitted, would probably not have been done otherwise. Pains were taken to stress that in no way was their methodology altered; was this scientific pedagogy emerging or just the result of constraints applied by the academic style of scientific writing?

The discussion that followed was both lively and heated with both artists and scientists present to contribute.

Siobhan Tucker