“I don’t care what you say about these quantum technologies,” the French conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe told Berlin-based curator Bettina Kames, “I don’t buy it.”
Quantum sensors and quantum computers exploit the workings of the world at the smallest achievable scale, where, among other oddities, particles may occupy more than one position at once. They perform calculations and take measurements that are otherwise fundamentally impossible. With them we could revolutionise drug discovery, secure global communications, understand the climate and accelerate artificial intelligence.
“People are usually fascinated and intrigued by this field,” says Kames, co-founder of LAS Art Foundation in Berlin, a roving gallery of future-facing, interdisciplinary work. Kames was out to commission a piece on the quantum realm but found Huyghe — an artist famed for his living installations that encompass aquariums, medicinal plants and Ibizan hounds — “quite critical”.