MSc. Media Technology – Statement to Experience – Fall 2019
In collaboration with Pieter Pierrot and Edith Järv.
For the Statement to Experience exhibition hosted in V2_ Rotterdam, we created an interactive installation based on the theme ‘Uncertainty’. In this project, the process of researching while creating the product was as important as the product itself.
Our statement: “To be AND not to be”.
The aim was to ‘humanize’ quantum mechanics, allowing visitors to explore what it means from a human perspective. Can we experience to be entangled or in superposition, and be conscious of parallel universes?
What does it mean “To be”? From Plato’s dialogue with the “stranger from Elea”: for something to be said to exist, it must affect something else, or be affected by something else. Textbook physics explicate the interaction of objects with each other, dictated by extrinsic causal powers. But consciousness seems to be an exception. We feel sure it exists but can give no evidence of it “causing” anything, nor can anyone else observe it (Koch, 2019).
We took the double-slit experiment as a starting point. The experiment, first performed by Thomas Young in 1801, showed that light and matter can display characteristics of both waves and particles. It shows the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum mechanical phenomena, and demonstrates the limitation to predict outcomes based on observations.
We translated the double slit experiment into a setup using video slit scanning. We experimented with several video slit scanning techniques, as shown on the footage below. Three screens were placed in a triangle, were an observer could stand in between. Each screen used a different slit scanning technique. One could look at one the the screens, see the other two scans recorded in the back, and thus look in a mirror causing interference patterns in the mind of the observer.
Project documentation can be found here.
Koch, C. (2019). The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed. Mit Press.
Feynman, R. P., Leighton, R. B., & Sands, M. (1965). The Feynman lectures on physics; vol. i. American Journal of Physics, 33(9), 750-752.
