There’s A Burgeoning Quantum Art Scene
Over the past six months, myself and a handful of folks from IBM Quantum have had the pleasure of working with The New School and the Parsons School of Design to put on a Design Jam that explores quantum computing through the lens of art and music. We began organizing the event under the hypothesis that quantum computing, though nascent, has the capacity to be used for creative expression. Although cautiously optimistic about how many participants would join, we ended up having over one hundred individuals sign up, over double our initial goal, resulting in several very successful concepts that I believe serve as proof that exploring quantum computing through a creative lens could give rise to a new scene of art. Below is a quick video about the work produced from the event.
Throughout this blog, I want to capture why this event was important for the broader future of quantum computing and artistic expression.
The affordances of the medium
Inspired by my former advisor and mentor Janet Murray’s work Inventing the Medium, I believe that every technology and every artistic medium has a set of affordances that make them unique.
Fundamentally, every medium is a form of technology that enables artists to do new things. These affordances are different for each medium. For example, photography affords artists the ability to capture a moment in time in a way that watercolor cannot. However, watercolor has a gestural quality that generally can’t be replicated by a medium like photography. With both these examples, it is fundamentally chemistry that empowers the expressive qualities, be it photosensitive emulsions in photography or pigments in watercolor.
Defining a new medium
Computers have been made with the same fundamental principles since the early to mid twentieth century. However, quantum computing is like starting over and inventing the computer again from scratch, now powered via quantum mechanics to do computations instead of the standard classical principles most computers use today. By reinventing the computer to leverage quantum mechanical properties, a new set of affordances is introduced to power these computers, and these affordances can be exploited for creative purposes.
We are at the beginning of a new technology with new creative opportunities. Quantum computers are nascent, but are built on a set of concrete principles, including quantum superposition, entanglement, and interference. By making art and music with quantum computing and these principles, we are working with a new medium with new affordances. Quantum art and quantum music has the potential to be a brand new type of art that is as distinct from other mediums as photography is from painting.
Quantum computers have only been available outside of a lab setting for a few years, and much more recently than that have artists started to pay attention to the technology. Those artists working in the space right now are the vanguards of a new medium. But for this to become truly a medium, it is important that we start getting students and other creative types involved. The Design Jam was an attempt to rally art students around quantum computing.
The world’s first Quantum Design Jam
The Design Jam featured two tracks, quantum art and quantum music, each of which served to help new quantum artists and musicians explore the medium. The quantum art track was led by Russell Huffman and Paul Kassebaum and the quantum music track was led by James Weaver and Brian Ingmanson.
Quantum art
The art track focused on introducing the students to everything they would need to make art with quantum computing. Paul Kassebaum gave a physics primer that served as a gentle but comprehensive math-light introduction to quantum mechanics that included the phenomena that make quantum mechanics unique, and the things that students should consider in their artwork. Those things are:
- Not all information attributes of a quantum information medium are distinguishable.
- Undetectability of sharpness with a single shot
- Quantum information cannot be cloned
- There are pairs of observables not simultaneously preparable or measurable (also known as the uncertainty principle)
- Deterministic processes can be unpredictable
- Irreducible perturbation of one observable caused by measuring another
- Consistency of consecutive measurements of a non-sharp observable
- Quantization
- Coherence and locally inaccessible information
After Paul’s physics primer, I gave a tutorial on how one can make art with quantum computing using Processing, Qiskit, and eventually running their artwork with real quantum systems. All the material from the Jam, including tutorial code, starter project, and presentation slides can be found in this Github repo.
Quantum music
The potential to create music with a quantum computer poses so many possible directions that it’s almost overwhelming. Thankfully, James Weaver created a great starting point with the Quantum Music Playground, a Max for Live plugin built into the music creation program Ableton. This gave students a firm direction: use the statevectors produced by unique quantum circuits as a “keyboard” of potential notes. As the statevector is modified, so too is the pitch or instrument.
Using the Quantum Music Playground, students could build everything from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to a full-fledged EDM track. James walked through the fundamentals of how to make a simple melody, then Brian took a basic 4-on-the-floor drum beat and evolved it into a dance go-go pattern. All of the tutorials were modeled within the IBM Quantum Composer, and then implemented within the Quantum Music Playground. By the end of their session, students were rocking along (even on a Zoom call, which isn’t easy to accomplish!).
The main event
After the introductory sessions, the students began brainstorming and coming up with concepts. We met with all of the individual teams to review their concepts and help them focus their ideas. The concepts were surprisingly diverse and creative, many of which had potential for exploration beyond the Design Jam. Although the projects generally fell into the categories of music, art, or a combination of the two, it was very impressive to see the breadth of creativity in that space, including ideas around fashion, light, games, and more.
After a week of working and hacking, the students were invited to the IBM Quantum community space in Manhattan for the final critique. Overall, we were all very impressed by the genuine effort and focus on the science in the projects. The projects showed a legitimate effort towards the underlying mechanics of the technology. After all projects were presented, the mentors and judges chose one winner from each of the categories of art and music. Given the unexpectedly high caliber of many of the projects, four honorable mentions were chosen as well.
In order to give an idea of the type of thinking that went into the projects, below are screenshots and project descriptions from some of the projects under the “art and design” category, as written by the group participants. More information about each of the projects can be found here: http://innovationcenter.newschool.edu/awards-teams/.
Notable projects
Quantum Tetris (winner)
Quantum Tetris is a regular game of Tetris, except it’s powered by a Quantum Computer. Through this project we plan to explore the concept of ‘noise’ produced by the quantum computer. The ‘noise’ created by a quantum computer will eventually be eradicated, and so it will be interesting to explore this unique characteristic while it still exists in the quantum computing of today. As the viewer plays the game of Tetris, the first thing they will realize is the absolute unpredictability of the block. Next, they will slowly see how the blocks eventually mutate into new shapes that wouldn’t exist in the regular game. The blocks are generated by a quantum computer, and hence the noise generated by the circuits are eventually made visible. The humble Tetris game is rejuvenated by the addition of quantum computing. This is a great example of how quantum computing can be used to power the next generation of games, with the availability of true randomness. The game uses data generated from the quantum computers at IBM. The viewer will be invited to play with the installation with a physical controller and as they interact with the system, they will start to encounter the noise, analogous to what is created by a quantum computer. This game of Tetris is fairly modular and is intended to be used as an installation at offices, schools, and exhibitions centers. We envision the installation as being a playful medium through which the viewer can start to understand the complexities of a quantum computing system.
Entangled Moments
Entangled Moments uses quantum bell circuit data to process videos and generate random photography art: illustrating the quantum glitch of today.
Our data input is video footage shot through windows. This is to embrace the surrealism of Quantum Mechanics. When you look out of your window, the apparently still world is constantly changing, but such subtle nuances are invisible to our working minds. The view from our window is never as it seems: Supposedly still things shift and age, supposedly fleeting moments are eternally influential.
Quantum Uniform
As the relationship between human and technology evolves, humans will be recognized using data rather than biological attributes. The idea is to transmit secure data generated by facial recognition using quantum cryptography without fear of eavesdropping. We aim to visualize this information and physically manifest it through textile development to create one of a kind garments that reflect the biometric data of the wearer.
Q-Sweeper
Minesweeper, but Quantum. We used results from running an algorithm on a quantum computer to create the map for Q-Sweeper, improving the complexity of the original map because of quantum noise. We also developed two new mechanics for the game inspired by quantum concepts such as entanglement and interference. https://pandahya.github.io/qjam-entangled/
Interlacing Qubits
We utilized the superposition concept in our ‘Lenticular’ prototype. We generated digitally with the power of IBM quantum computer and with the help of ‘Jared Hoffman’, the professional Lenticular artist. With this effect, we hope that the viewers could experience the ‘Quantum Weirdness’ from observing these interlacing images. Looking at our world today, we also interpret ’entanglement in our ‘encrypted’ text image. With Quantum computers, we can create a new visual yet pertain the information on the original text image. Developing from the initial idea, we see the opportunity to apply this to real world problems. We could encrypt images to increase security.
Conclusion
To me, the event validated that there is a potential for the medium of quantum art. There was enough of a breadth of thinking with enough potential to say that the medium can grow and mature. I hope the students will continue to explore the space and mature the concepts that they started exploring during this event.
Up until this point, there have been a handful of artists and creatives from around the world who have explored using quantum computing and art, but to me, this event marks the birth of the quantum art scene.
I want to thank everyone who helped make this event a reality. The event’s primary organizer was Maya Georgieva, who proposed the Design Jam as a part The New School’s Innovation Center launch. Also from The New School side was Sven Travis, and Lin Zhou. The event organizers from IBM were Russell Huffman, Paul Kassebaum, James Weaver, Brian Ingmanson, Josiane Emorine, and Austin Flon. Thank you to all of you. There were others who helped in various capacities to make the event a reality that may not have been mentioned above, so thank you to everyone who was involved.
This blog is primarily authored by Russell Huffman with text input from Paul Kassebaum and Brian Ingmanson. All opinions are our own and the above article does not represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
