Doubting Conventional Reality: Visual Art and Quantum Mechanics Lynden Elizabeth Stone BA LLM BFA (Hons) Queensland College Of

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Doubting Conventional Reality: Visual Art and Quantum Mechanics

Lynden Elizabeth Stone BA LLM BFA (Hons)

Queensland College of Art Arts Education and Law Griffith University Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2013

Synopsis

Quantum mechanics give significant cause to doubt conventional reality. This exegesis answers the question of how visual art, in engaging with quantum concepts, can enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality. I argue that visual art can do this by an artwork’s capacity to provoke unconventional thinking in the viewer and by the artist’s prudent considerations of materials and metaphor. I discuss my own artworks and those of others to assess the capacity of such works to cause ruptures of expected reality and so enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality. In particular, I argue that my three ‘mind works’ projects (the Metaphase Typewriter revival project, the Mind Lamp project and the Mind dispenser) are successful (even just on a metaphoric level) in enabling a viewer to doubt conventional reality. Specifically, this is because they provide the viewer opportunities to interact with events of quantum superposition, using only consciousness, to arguably affect or even create material reality.

Statement of Originality

This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself.

______Lynden Elizabeth Stone

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations……………………………………………………………………………9 Acknowledgement of Assistance………………………………………………………...15 Chapter 1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………..19 Chapter 2 The extent of conventional reality……………………………………...... 29 Chapter 3 Conceptual foundation and engagement – quantum superposition…………49 Chapter 4 Conceptual foundation and engagement – the multiverse: a parallel proposition of non-collapse …………………………………………………………..77 Chapter 5 Conceptual foundation and engagement – quantum entanglement.………101 Chapter 6 Answering the “how” – provocation of unconventional thinking…………….117 Chapter 7 Answering the “how” – metaphors for the unvisualisable……………………147 Chapter 8 Considerations of materiality……………………………………………………171 Chapter 9 The mind works projects………………………………………………………...179 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………207 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………………211 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………..217 DVD Attachment Objective reality 2011, digital video, 2:07 min The double-slit experiment 2011, digital video, 4:34 min And dead 2011, digital video, 3:06 min

List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Lynden Stone, Metaphase Typewriter revival project 2012, Geiger counter, gas lamp mantle, wooden box, laptop, computer program, Perspex cover, dimensions variable.

Figure 2. Lynden Stone The mirror box project 2009, resource photographs

Figure 3. Lynden Stone The mirror box project 2009, resource photographs

Figure 4. Lynden Stone Objective reality 2011, digital video, 2:07 min, video still

Figure 5. Lynden Stone Objective reality 2011, digital video, 2:07 min, video still

Figure 6. Julian Voss-Andreae Quantum Man 2007, stainless steel, 250 x 110 x 50cm. Photograph courtesy Julian Voss-Andrea.

Figure 7. Daniel Crooks Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) 2010, digital video, 5:23 min, 16:9, 1080p24, video still, Stereo. Photograph courtesy Daniel Crooks and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Figure 8. Daniel Crooks, Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) 2010, digital video, 5:23 min, 16:9, 1080p24, video still, Stereo. Photograph courtesy Daniel Crooks and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Figure 9. Daniel Crooks, Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) 2010, digital video, 5:23 min, 16:9, 1080p24, video still, Stereo. Photograph courtesy Daniel Crooks and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Figure 10. Lynden Stone The double-slit experiment 2011, digital video, 4:34 min, video still

Figure 11. Lynden Stone, The double-slit experiment 2011, digital video, 4:34 min, video still

Figure 12. Lynden Stone, The double-slit experiment 2011, digital video, 4:34 min, video still

Figure 13. David Shrigley I’m dead 2007, taxidermied cat, wooden sign, acrylic paint dimensions variable

Figure 14. Lynden Stone Erwin’s puss 2011, oil on canvas 100 cm x 150cm. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Figure 15. Lynden Stone And dead 2011, digital video, 3:06 min, media player, metal box (11 x 20 x 16cm), video still

Figure 16. Lynden Stone Kevin wondered if the moon was there when he wasn’t looking 2010—12, oil on board, digital video, (2:05 min), media player, metal box (14.5 x 18.5 x 3cm), installed dimensions approximately 42 x 50 x 14cm. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Figure 17. Lynden Stone The superposition of Neville’s brain, also known as Wigner’s Friend 2010—13, oil on canvas and board, electrical wires, metal box (11 x 20 x 16cm), media player, digital video (8:35 min), installed dimensions approximately 89 x 120 x 16cm

Figure 18. Antony Gormley Quantum Cloud 1999, steel sections, 3000 x 1600 x 1000cm. Photograph courtesy Andy Roberts.

Figure 19. Lynden Stone In another universe, my mother gave me the two Mars Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets 1993—2013, pastel on paper, award sash, oil on canvas, two Mars bars, pen on paper, glass jar and vase, plastic toy rocket, wooden cupboard, 96.5 x 180.5 x 13cm, installation view

Figure 20. Lynden Stone In another universe, my mother gave me the two Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets 1993—2013, pastel on paper, award sash, detail

Figure 21. Lynden Stone In another universe, my mother gave me the two Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets 1993—2013, oil on canvas, detail

Figure 22. Lynden Stone Dribblejuice 2010—12, oil on board, inkjet print on cotton, viewing mirror, LED sensor light, chair, dimensions variable. Photograph by Renata Buziak.

Figure 23. Lynden Stone Dribblejuice 2010—12, detail. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Figure 24. Lynden Stone Dribblejuice 2010—2012, installation view

Figure 25. Lynden Stone Dribblejuice 2010—2012, installation view. Photograph by Renata Buziak.

Figure 26. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, acrylic and oil on board, digital video (9:11 min) dimensions variable

Figure 27. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, detail, video still

Figure 28. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, detail

Figure 29. Lynden Stone Peter practiced every day with his Everett box 2011, oil on board, bicycle mirror, lenticular bookmark, 41.5 x 64cm. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Figure 30. Denise Stewart-Sanabria Quantum Confusion 2010, charcoal on plywood, 244 x 549 x 244cm. Photograph courtesy Denise Stewart-Sanabria

Figure 31. Denise Stewart-Sanabria’s Quantum Confusion 2010, detail. Photograph courtesy Denise Stewart-Sanabria

Figure 32. Laurent Grasso iheartmyart (from the Studies into the past series) 2010, oil on panel, 30 x 24cm

Figure 33. Laurent Grasso Sphere (from the Studies into the past series) 2010, oil on panel, 32 x 25.5cm

Figure 34. Lynden Stone A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) 2013, wood and steel barrel, 24 x 30 x 24cm, laser print poster (94 x 64 cm) portable media player, video, 2:37 min, metal and plastic viewing box, installed dimensions variable

Figure 35. Lynden Stone A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) 2013, detail

Figure 36. Lynden Stone A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) 2013, detail

Figure 37. Lynden Stone A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) 2013, detail

Figure 38. Lynden Stone A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) 2013, detail. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Figure 39. Victor Fota Quantum Entanglement n.d., oil and metal leaf on canvas, 48 x 38cm

Figure 40. Regina Valluzzi Entangled 2012 , acrylic on canvas

Figure 41. Koji Ryui Quantum Entanglement 2010, poly-coated wire, garden wire, steel rod, laminated particle board, peg board, carbon meteorite, plastic, sand, plastic ball, wood, painted cane stool, installation view, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. Image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Figure 42. Koji Ryui Quantum Entanglement 2010, installation view, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. Image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Figure 43. Lucy McKenna Galaxy Dioramas 2012, wooden box, lens, mirror, plastic, slide image, LED, battery, installation view and detail. Photograph courtesy Lucy McKenna.

Figure 44. Lucy McKenna Galaxy Dioramas 2012, detail of interior view through peephole. Photograph courtesy Lucy McKenna.

Figure 45. Lucy McKenna Beta barium borate crystal 2012, beta barium borate crystal, plastic box. Photograph courtesy Lucy McKenna.

Figure 46. Lucy McKenna Beta barium borate crystal 2012, beta barium borate crystal, plastic box. Photograph courtesy Lucy McKenna.

Figure 47. Lucy McKenna Quantizing Portents 2012, three video stills. Photograph courtesy Lucy McKenna.

Figure 48. Jonathon Keats Quantum Entanglements 2011, nonlinear beta- barium borate crystal, beam splitter, condensing lens, mirror, installation view. Photograph courtesy of Jonathon Keats.

Figure 49. Jonathon Keats Quantum Entanglements 2011, detail. Photograph courtesy of Jonathon Keats.

Figure 50. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, oil on board, digital video (9:11 min), dimensions variable

Figure 51. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, detail

Figure 52. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, detail

Figure 53. Rembrandt van Rijn Christ at Emmaus 1648, oil on board, 65 x 68cm

Figure 54. Lynden Stone A reminder of nows 2012, oil on board, digital video (3:38 min), media player, 63 x 26 x 4cm

Figure 55. Lynden Stone A reminder of nows 2012, installation view. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Figure 56. Lynden Stone The superposition of Neville’s brain, also known as Wigner’s Friend 2010—13, oil on canvas and board, electrical wires, metal box (11 x 20 x 16cm), media player, video (8:35 min), approximate installed dimensions: 89 x 120 x 16cm, detail. Photograph by Renata Buziak.

Figure 57. Julian Barbour’s schematic model of “Platonia” from Killing Time Noorderlicht, December 1999 and first shown early in 2000 now on You Tube as: “Julian Barbour – La Fine del Tempo (2 di2)”, You Tube video, by uploaded February 10, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj6z5EQy4gg.

Figure 58. Sam Leach Walrus Configuration 1 (from the Platonia series) 2010, oil and resin on linen on wood, 26 cm x 36cm. Image source: from COMODAA Art galleries http://www.theloop.com.au/comodaa/project/16411

Figure 59. Sam Leach Birds Boundary (from the Platonia series) 2010, oil and resin on linen on wood, 26 cm x 36cm. Image source: COMODAA Art galleries http://www.theloop.com.au/comodaa/project/16411

Figure 60. Sam Leach Crocodile Reflection (from the Platonia series) 2010, oil and resin on linen, 45 cm x 30 cm. Image source: COMODAA Art galleries http://www.theloop.com.au/comodaa/project/16411

Figure 61. Lynden Stone Kevin’s favourite thing was collapsing the wavefunction 2011—12, diptych, oil on board, acrylic on paper, lenticular print, magnifying lens, mirrors, aluminium. Installed dimensions 67 x 53 x 16cm. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Figure 62. Richard Feynman “Intuitive” diagrams of the interaction of quanta, n.d. Image source: http://inspirehep.net/record/1082448/files/fig4.png

Figure 63. Maria Raff Feynman’s Fancy series n.d., stainless steel. Image source: http://www.marciaraffstudio.com/Feynmans.html

Figure 64. Maria Raff Feynman’s Fancy series n.d., stainless steel. Image source: http://www.marciaraffstudio.com/Feynmans.html

Figure 65. Lynden Stone Klein bottle meditation – pencil #1 (red) (from the Meditations on Klein bottles series) 2013, oil on board, 30 x 30cm

Figure 66. Lynden Stone Klein bottle meditation – pencil #2 (yellow) (from the Meditations on Klein bottles series) 2013, oil on board, 30 x 30cm

Figure 67. Lynden Stone Klein bottle meditation – mirror #1 (yellow) (from the Meditations on Klein bottles series) 2013, oil on board, 30 x 30cm

Figure 68. Lynden Stone Klein bottle meditation – mirror #2 (pink) (from the Meditations on Klein bottles series) 2013, oil on board, 30 x 30cm

Figure 69. Lynden Stone The dynamic relationship between observation and creation # 1 (Space Invaders) 2013, oil on canvas, 150 x 110cm

Figure 70. Lynden Stone, The dynamic relationship between observation and creation # 2 (QIX) 2013, oil on canvas, 96 x 120cm

Figure 71. Parts of the Klein bottle, from theorist Paul Ryan’s graphic linear schemata for the Klein bottle. Image courtesy Estate of Paul Ryan.

Figure 72. Robert Hollingworth Event Horizon 2012, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 99cm

Figure 73. Robert Hollingworth Lightspeed 2012, acrylic on canvas, 99 x 84cm

Figure 74. Lynden Stone Dribblejuice 2010—12 (earlier version), two panels, oil on board, inkjet print on paper, inkjet print on cotton, mirrored view finder, LED sensor light, chair, dimensions variable

Figure 75. Lynden Stone Metaphase Typewriter revival project 2012, Geiger counter, gas lamp mantle, laptop, program, Perspex cover, dimensions variable, installation view. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Figure 76. Lynden Stone Metaphase Typewriter revival project 2012, Geiger counter, gas lamp mantle, laptop, program, Perspex cover, dimensions variable

Figure 77. Lynden Stone Metaphase Typewriter revival project 2012, detail

Figure 78. Lynden Stone Mind Lamp project 2012—13, Psyleron Enterprise’s electron tunnelling device, lamp shade, metal articulated arm, lenticular prints (106.5 x 81cm), digital video (2:23 min), monitor, plastic fish, banana, shelf, jacket, dimensions variable

Figure 79. Lynden Stone Mind Lamp project 2012—13, installation views. Photographs by Renata Buziak.

Figure 80. Lynden Stone Mind Lamp performance (part of the Mind Lamp project) 2012—13, video stills

Figure 81. Lynden Stone Mind Lamp project 2012—13, detail

Figure 82. Lynden Stone Mind Lamp project 2012—13, detail

Figure 83. Lynden Stone Mind dispenser 2013—2014, oil on board, Geiger counter, fluorescent wrist watch arms, microprocessor, motor drivers, optical detectors, wire, connecting board, pull type solenoids, plastic augers, metal and plastic lolly drop receiver, power supply, Perspex, Gobstoppers

Figure 84. Lynden Stone Mind dispenser 2013—2014, installation view. Photograph by Renata Buziak.

Figure 85. Lynden Stone Mind dispenser 2013—2014, installation view. Photograph by Renata Buziak.

Acknowledgement of Assistance

I wish to acknowledge and thank Professor Mostyn Bramley-Moore for his guidance, encouragement and friendship during the course of my doctoral research. His idiosyncratic ideas and suggestions were invaluable in shaking up my own conventional realities of art-making into something far more interesting. I also thank him for the several exhibitions he organised that allowed me (and others) opportunities to exhibit work. In addition I am grateful for his helpful comments and suggestions concerning this exegesis.

Thank you to Dr George Petelin for his suggestions and guidance on areas of theoretical areas of research. I also appreciate his significant assistance in developing and fine-tuning this exegesis. In addition, I am grateful for the several opportunities to present papers at symposiums at QCA organised by Dr Petelin.

I am grateful to Professor Howard Wiseman, Director of the Centre for Quantum Dynamics (CQD) at Griffith University, Nathan. In 2010 and 2012, Professor Wiseman invited me to present slide-shows of my work to physicists at CQD. This provided me with opportunities for feedback about my work from a non- arts-based audience and also to test my expression of quantum concepts with experts. These opportunities were enjoyable and also helpful in developing my work. I also acknowledge and thank Professor Wiseman for the comments and suggestions he made on Chapters 1, 3, 4 and 5 of this exegesis.

I am also grateful to the other physicists at CQD who showed interest in and provided feedback on my artwork and writing. I particularly acknowledge Associate Professor Geoff Pryde who provided comments and corrections on my writing on quantum entanglement and Joan Vaccaro and David Pegg, both of whom were helpful in answering my questions and clarifying my understanding of particular quantum theories.

My thanks and gratitude to Nick Herbert for taking an interest in The Metaphase Typewriter revival project, a contemporary art version of his Metaphase Typewriter. Nick gave advice and encouragement and most importantly his

imprimatur to my project. Each time the artwork was exhibited, he generously publicised the fact to his friends and the worldwide physics community via his blogsite.

I am very grateful for the assistance of my brother, Damon Permezel (aka M. U. Shrooms) who collaborated with me on The Metaphase Typewriter revival project and wrote the operating program for that work. Damon also provided programming assistance to me for the display of the video on the Mind Lamp project. I also acknowledge the encouragement and support that Damon and his wife Liz Hughes gave to me over the last four years. They have never failed to take an active interest in my research and exhibitions.

I acknowledge and thank musician Chris Bristow who composed the wonderful music for the Mind Lamp project.

My sincere gratitude to my collaborative partners on the Mind dispenser project, Anderson Tepas and Professor Steven O’Keefe. Anderson, under the expert supervision of Steven, took on the Mind dispenser as his final semester project to complete his under-graduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering at Griffith University in 2013. Anderson and Steven provided practical, yet elegant, suggestions and solutions concerning the design and mechanical workings of the device. Anderson undertook the manufacture of the device, working long past the end of the semester to complete it, for which I am very grateful.

I thank my father, Neville, whose life stories provided inspiration for several artworks and who also cooperated in the making of the video component of My father’s girlfriends. He also showed unwavering interest in this research project and gave valuable feedback on an earlier version of Chapter 2.

I am indebted to David Sawtell and Andrew Forsyth from the QCA workshop for invaluable and willing advice and assistance on various projects.

Thanks to my QCA studio room mates Bill Platz, Zoe Porter and Renata Buziak who facilitated working in the studio an enjoyable and productive experience.

I acknowledge and thank Evie Franzidis for her extensive and careful edit of this exegesis. Her corrections and suggestions were invaluable.

And finally, to my daughters, Madeline and Eloise; I thank them for their love and support. They would have, I suspect, preferred a mother who was more attentive to them during the last four years. Their indulgence of and support for me has made my research much easier.

…..should there not then be sufficient space for all sorts of curiosities for which, in the end the distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘psychical’ loses meaning? Wolfgang Pauli1

Chapter 1 Introduction

In the Webb Gallery at the Queensland College of Art in Brisbane, Eric’s sonorous voice, one of the three choices of male voices on my MacBook Pro’s text-to-voice reader, echoes around the concrete ceiling. Eric is reading words, and sometimes sentences, produced as a result of random numbers generated by a Geiger counter reading the haphazard decay of low-grade radioactive material. Sentient and non- sentient beings are invited to interact with the device. Through the Metaphase Typewriter revival project (2012) (figures 1, 74 and 75) I offer an opportunity to test the idea that consciousness might affect or even create material reality.

Since 2009, I have been making mixed media artworks that are based on concepts of quantum mechanics. In physics, the terms ‘quantum mechanics’ and ‘quantum theory’ are often used interchangeably and refer to the formulation and explanation of the world at the sub-atomic scale. In this exegesis, the interchangeability of these terms is maintained. However, I use the term ‘quantum theory’ to refer to various competing ontological explanations of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics demands a re-evaluation of the commonly accepted understanding of ‘conventional reality’ as knowable, mind- independent and objective.2 I adopt this as a definition of conventional reality for the purpose of this exegesis. My experience of what I think of as reality generally accords with this definition, insofar as I perceive objects ‘out there’ to exist separately from me and that objects have predetermined characteristics that are independent of whatever observations or measurements I might perform on them. In particular, I can unobtrusively observe and measure objects without affecting their state or the dynamics of the system within which they exist. I sense that objects exist outside my mind and are not just a creation of it. Naturally, I conclude that objects, other people, and the rest of the physical world would exist even if I did not exist.

This exegesis analyses my practice-led research I have undertaken for my PhD to examine how visual art that engages with quantum concepts can enable a viewer to doubt knowable, mind-independent, objective reality. My thesis comprises two parts: an installation of mixed media works on show in the Webb

Gallery from 5 February to 16 February 2014 and this written exegesis. As I will discuss, a particular body of my works—my ‘mind works’ projects—offers viewers an opportunity to test the idea that consciousness might collapse quantum superposition to affect or even create material reality. This idea is based on certain quantum theorists’ view that human consciousness is the agent of collapse of superposed states of quanta into the material reality of our physical world.

Figure 1. Lynden Stone, Metaphase Typewriter revival project 2012, Geiger counter, gas lamp mantle, wooden box, laptop, computer program, Perspex cover, dimensions variable.

Quantum mechanics has been described by physicists as one of the “two great pillars of twentieth century science” 3 (the other great pillar being Einstein’s theory of gravity4) and “the fundamental underpinning of all modern science”.5

However, despite the fact that quantum mechanics has been accurate in explaining a vast range of phenomena, physicists have failed to agree on exactly what the discoveries of the nature of quantum behaviour mean for our understanding and experience of conventional reality. In 1989, Roger Penrose then Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, Professor of Geometry at Gresham College and Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Penn State University, asserted that quantum theory is the fundamental explanation of the scheme of things; thus the startling nature of quantum behaviour (superposition, apparent collapse and entanglement) forces us to change our view of physical reality.6

In part, my research into how visual art that engages with quantum concepts, might enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality, aims to respond to a decades-long call from the scientific community for a re-evaluation of ‘conventional reality’.7 This call is based on the fact that quantum mechanics conflicts with the notion of a knowable, mind-independent, objective reality in fundamental and shocking ways. In contrast to the macroscopic conventional reality I perceive, in the subatomic quantum world there is no physical matter as I understand it. Rather, according to the accepted formulation of quantum mechanics, pre-material states of connected multiple possibilities (states of ‘superposition’) exist. These superposed states, according to conventional views, are collapsed and brought into definite states of singular material reality through observation or measurement. 8 Rather than reality being knowable, objective and mind-independent, quantum theories pose the confronting possibility that there is a quantum realm imperceptible to and unknowable by me and that the reality I experience is brought into existence through my observations, even, controversially, by my own consciousness. 9 In a further challenge to my perception of reality, some quantum particles exhibit ‘entangled’ characteristics that indicate an inexplicable interconnectivity of physical matter that Einstein sceptically described as “spooky action at a distance”.10 Quantum mechanics describes the immaterial or pre-material. It also describes a relationship of entanglement where distantly separated parts demonstrate instant connectivity that cannot be explained by local causes. The quantum realm has no equivalence to the physical world. In this sense it is not able to be

visualised in terms of the physical universe we experience. Nevertheless, visual art may facilitate some understanding of quantum concepts in more comprehendible ways to non-scientists than the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics can. According to physicist and philosopher David Bohm, art is a vehicle capable of exploring “fundamentally new modes of perception, through the senses and new forms of imagination”.11 Barbara Maria Stafford suggests that, conceptually, images can simplify a complex environment and also make “aspects of the world perceptually salient and cognitively distinctive for us”.12

Historically, visual art has played a role in modelling difficult and unconventional concepts. Artists have engaged with metaphysical concepts to explain the apparently inexplicable, to represent the unseen and imperceptible and, in so doing, somehow make sense of a possible world beyond the physical world we ordinarily experience. Some examples include pre-modern religious images, such as Byzantine icons where divine beings were thought to be present in the image and, through the image, they could intervene into the world;13 Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of patterns made by fast flowing water, and sequences in the flutter of a pigeon’s wing in flight (much later, slow-motion photography confirmed what he, but not others, had somehow seen);14 Correggio’s depiction of the Roman god Jupiter as a cloud seducing Io (Jupiter and Io (circa 1530)); Renaissance painters’ inclusion of cupids, angels, saints and other unearthly beings in their works; Hieronymus Bosch’s showed a fantastical alternate world; Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s paintings and collages which suggested a multiple-view of objects in space that transcend ordinary human perception; the Surrealists’ renderings of the workings of the mind (and, according to art historian Gavin Parkinson, the post-1930 Surrealists assimilated concepts of quantum mechanics into their paintings); 15 Wassily Kandinsky’s attempts to paint sounds; and MC Escher’s experiments with the logic of space. More recent examples include, Alyce Santoro’s video, WAVES become MATTER: improvisation for flute and Rubens tube (2011), which shows how sound waves generated by a flute played near a lit Ruben’s tube change the shapes of the flames. 16 The duo, Ms&Mr, create new videos through interventionist acts on old footage. By adding in contemporary film, they create retrospective narratives about time and space, multiple possibilities and

entangled states. In their 808.838 / grandfather paradox film footage of one of the artists as a baby, the artist’s grandfather and the artist in contemporary times “are recalibrated in an act that literalises the theoretical loop of the grandfather paradox, a familiar trope in science fiction”.17 Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples’ The Telepathy Project questions metaphysical communication boundaries. They have conducted numerous telepathy performances as artworks including telepathically curating a group show, acting as the mediums in an exchange between an audience and a pool full of live eels. In one project, they tested the idea that “images and ideas themselves are tangible things” by placing something under each other’s pillows each night for twenty days to see if the thing placed would affect their dreams.18

Many artists have pursued metaphysical concerns in an endeavour to question dominant paradigms of reality. For the purpose of this exegesis, I will limit my investigation to contemporary artworks that engage with quantum concepts. For artists, metaphors, materials and symbols from our experience of reality may be inadequate, imprecise or powerless to suggest the imperceptible pre-material entangled quantum domain. How, then can visual art that engages in quantum concepts enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality? In this exegesis, I argue that this is done through an artwork’s capacity to provoke unconventional thinking in the viewer and by the artist’s prudent considerations of materials and metaphor.

In Chapter 2, I argue that our understanding of conventional reality is based on a mechanistic and materialistic view that reality is objective, knowable through empirical methods and is mind-independent. We interact with objects, people and animals that are made of physical matter and appear to have an objective, independent existence to our own. Quantum mechanics, however, challenges an idea that the extent of reality is objective physical and material and raises the possibility that consciousness, through observation and measurement, may be involved in creating materiality. A materialistic, empirical notion of conventional reality is the reason why we encounter difficulty in grasping the counter-intuitive nature of quantum mechanics. Based on the contestation that quantum mechanics poses to conventional reality, artworks that contest the foundations

of this belief, like those that are based on quantum concepts, will, I argue throughout this exegesis, enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality.

In this exegesis, I am concerned with artworks that overtly engage with quantum concepts. So as to discuss and analyse artworks that have such ideas as their conceptual basis, I provide a coherent outline of quantum mechanical and theoretical concepts in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, introducing artworks under a heading of “Conceptual foundation and engagement”. Engagement, I argue, requires the artist to have a reasonable understanding of the concepts of quantum mechanics. Where the conceptual basis is misunderstood, the artwork cannot be a successful engagement and may only confuse the viewer as to why quantum mechanics demands a re-evaluation of conventional reality. Most of the artworks introduced in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 will all be elaborated on in subsequent chapters.

In Chapter 3, I focus on particular artworks in which the artist seeks to examine the quantum concept that our world, at a fundamental level, is in states of pre- material superposition of multiple possibilities that, somehow, through collapse of superposition, become the singular reality that we experience. In Chapter 4, I discuss artworks in terms of their engagement with the non-collapse, many- worlds theory of the branching universe. Then, in Chapter 5, I discuss artworks where the conceptual basis of the artworks is quantum entanglement; where interconnected particles can instantly affect one another although distantly separated without evidence of local factors acting upon them.

In Chapters 6, 7 and 8, I address the question of how artworks might enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality. How this is done relates to the power of visual images to convey meaning and cognition. I argue that the artist conveys meaning, thereby facilitating cognition in the viewer, through using metaphorical devices, making material choices and provoking unconventional thinking. In Chapter 6, I argue that if artworks can provoke unconventional thinking in the viewer, this might overcome linear thinking that is restricted to the logic of conventional reality. I will draw on analyses proposed by Rudolf Arnheim and Barbara Maria Stafford to analyse how artworks can rupture ordinary expectations of conventional reality. I also apply Arnheim’s model of isomorphic

structural correspondence to my own and other artists’ works. Arnheim places particularly high cognitive value on images whose formal structures metaphorically reflect the conceptual structure of the idea behind the work. In his analysis, these images are capable of provoking unconventional, non-linear thinking. The difficulty in applying this kind of structure to artworks that engage with quantum concepts is the lack of correspondence between the quantum world and the physical world. However, artists have found one solution to this impasse by drawing metaphoric correspondence between their artworks and models created by physicists and mathematicians. Mindful of Arnheim’s isomorphic structure, in Chapter 6, I will analyse artworks that refer to scientific modelling of quantum concepts.

In Chapter 7, I further discuss the limits and capacity of the metaphor for expressing quantum concepts. I will argue that the empiricist theory of the metaphor that is based on existing knowledge of an objective world is unhelpful for the artist, particularly so because it is contrary to the precepts of quantum mechanics. The intellectualist and experientialist models, however, support a theory that a metaphor is capable of inciting new knowledge both for the creator and the viewer that is helpful for the artist engaging in quantum concepts. How, this is done psychologically is left unanswered in these accounts. Accordingly, I argue Thomas Frentz’s psychological model of the metaphor that calls into service both the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious and David Bohm’s quantum theory of the implicate and explicate order that is helpful to the artist in these circumstances.

In Chapter 8, I will examine the significance of the artist’s choice of materials in representing quantum ideas. As quantum concepts involve metaphysical notions of superposition, entanglement, and (possibly) consciousness, the materials from our macroscopic world may be inadequate to convey these ideas. I argue how an artist, in engaging with quantum concepts, must be particularly conscious of material choices.

Using the tools I have identified in Chapters 6, 7 and 8, in Chapter 9, I undertake a detailed description and analysis of my three ‘mind works projects’: the Metaphase Typewriter revival project (2012) (figures 1, 75, 76, and 77), the

Mind Lamp project (2012 – 2013) (figures 78, 79, 80, 81 and 82) and the Mind dispenser (2013) (figures 83m 84 and 85). I devote a chapter to these works because I believe that they, more than any other of my works, enable the viewer to doubt conventional reality. The basis for this claim is twofold: first, they provide an artistic, metaphorical representation of quantum concepts, allowing the viewer to contemplate that consciousness might fill the unexplained gap between the quantum world and the physical world. Second, they provide the viewer with quantum random events 19 with which they can use only their consciousness to, arguably, affect or create material reality. In this sense they provide possibly a direct and phenomenal experience of engagement with the quantum realm. The viewer has an immediate sense that, if their own consciousness can affect or create material reality, then conventional reality is to be doubted.

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1 Charles Enz, No Time To Be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 421—22. 2 Bernard d’Espagnat, “Quantum Physics and Reality,” Foundations of Physics 41, no.11 (November 2011): 1712—13. 3 Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 157—58. 4 Ibid., 158. 5 John Gribbin, In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat (London: Black Swan, 1984), 1. 6 Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 291—92. 7 See Neils Bohr “Quantum and Physical Reality,” Physical Review 48 (1935): 697; Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper Torchbook, [1958] 1962), 50—58, particularly 54— 55; David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 327; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 24; d’Espagnat, “Quantum Physics and Reality,” 1712—1713. 8 Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 54—55. 9 See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, “The Observer in the Quantum Experiment,” Foundations of Physics 32, no. 8 (August 2002): 1273—1293; Eugene Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, [1961] 1983), 168; Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, “Orchestrated Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules: A Model for Consciousness,” Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, 40 (1996): 453 – 480; Amit Goswami, “Physics Within Nondual Consciousness,” Philosophy East & West, 51 no. 4 (2001): 535—544;

John Archibald Wheeler, “Law Without Law,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, 182—213; Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: An Alternative to Materialism”, Zygon, 41, no. 3 (2006): 599—615, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9744.2005.00762.x; Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: II: the Libet and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Causal Anomalies”, Erkenntnis, 65 (2006): 117–142, doi: 10.1007/s10670-006-9017-y; John von Neumann, 1955, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955); Evan Harris Walker, The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge: Perseus, 2000); Eugene Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1967), 171—84; Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006). 10 Letter from Einstein to Max Born, 3 March 1947 in The Born-Einstein Letters; Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born from 1916 to 1955, trans. Irene Born (London: MacMillan, 1971), 158. 11 David Bohm, On Creativity (London: Routledge, 1996), 134. 12 Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 207. 13 Hans Belting, cited in Karol Berger, A Theory of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 214n16; Ernst Gombrich, 1959. Art & Illusion – A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1959), 220. 14 Gombrich, Art & Illusion, 433. 15 Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science (London: Yale University Press, 2008); Gavin Parkinson, “Surrealism and Quantum Mechanics: Dispersal and Fragmentation in Art, Life, and Physics,” Science in Context, 17, no.4 (2004): 557—77. 16 Alyce Santoro, “WAVES become MATTER: improvisation for flute and ruben's tube,” You Tube, uploaded 22 June 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Vw2Ae8WLE 17 Ms&Mr, “The Grandfather Paradox,” http://www.msandmr.net/artwork.php?artwork=20110804123124 18 Veronica Kent, “The Telepathy Project,” (PhD Diss., The Victorian College of the Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, 2012), 38. 19 In the Metaphase Typewriter revival project and in the Mind dispenser, quantum random events occur through events of decay of low-level radioactive decay. In the Mind Lamp project, events are provided through electron tunnelling.

Chapter 2 The Extent of Conventional Reality

Introduction My research is based on the assumption that quantum mechanics forces a re- evaluation of conventional reality. In order to answer the question: “how can visual art that is inspired by quantum concepts, enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality?” conventional reality itself must be analysed. The ambit of conventional reality, based on a knowable, mind-independent and objective idea of the world, supports the notion that the extent of reality is what we can observe in the physical world. Accordingly, the non-physical subjective activity of thinking and consciousness are not part of an objective reality. Quantum mechanics contests the idea that we can know the extent of reality and that reality is only the physical world. In addition, quantum theories open the possibility that consciousness, as an active agent in quantum processes, produces physical outcomes.

In The Conscious Mind, cognitive scientist and Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University and New York University, David Chalmers 1 defines “consciousness” to include the phenomena of being able to discriminate stimuli, report information, monitor internal states and control behaviour as well as the phenomena of subjective experience which includes perception, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotions, thoughts and more. 2 Consciousness involves a conscious experience called ‘qualia’ that has a qualitative, phenomenal feeling to it. The key aspect of qualia (and therefore consciousness) is that it is subjective; there is an internal aspect to it.3 I adopt Chalmer’s definition of consciousness for the purpose of this exegesis.

This chapter introduces concepts of objective reality, the mechanistic view of reality, the know-ability of reality, and the extent to which mental aspects of experience and reality might be part of an extended, metaphysical reality. All these concepts set the foundation for the extent to which artworks challenge conventional reality and how the artist, in challenging the foundations of conventional reality, can enable the viewer to doubt its range.

In Chapter 1, I introduced the idea of “conventional reality” as mind- independent, objective and knowable4 but how can we be sure of an objective world that exists outside our minds? How is conventional reality ‘knowable’? Do we not use our minds in this interaction? Does that mean our minds should be included in a definition of reality? If our minds interact with an objective universe, is this interaction passive where we absorb information, like having an empty bucket into which “material enters through our senses … and accumulates and becomes digested”, 5 or are our minds active agents in interpreting or even creating our reality? These questions must be addressed if the definition of conventional reality as a mind-independent, objective and knowable reality is to be maintained.

Three aspects are considered in my understanding of reality: the first involves my perception of and interaction with physical objects (for example, the apparent solidity and hardness of a stone). The second aspect is my thoughts and reactions that are provoked by my interaction with physical objects (that is, upon touching the stone, I might have thoughts about similarities and differences to other stones I have touched). And finally, my interaction with objects seems to be grounded in an underlying belief that those objects, such as the stone, exist independently of me and would exist if I was not in the world to observe them. My reality, it seems to me at least, is made up of physical objects that seem to occupy space, as well as thoughts and fundamental beliefs that do not seem to occupy space. What, then, is the extent of a reality that we can agree on? Is there an objective reality that we can all access through our perceptive faculties, and how might we do this? Or does reality extend past the notions of ‘objective’ and ‘mind-independent’ to incorporate, or more radically, entirely consist of, one’s thoughts?

Mirror box project Early in my studio research I was motivated to make artworks that interrogated the extent of a knowable, objective reality. I wanted the viewer to question their certainty that an objective reality, beyond what we perceive, exists. After

capturing footage of volunteers interacting with a mirror box, I found a way to express this in an artwork.

The mirror box is a device used in physical therapy to reduce phantom limb pain. For people who have lost a limb and suffer from this condition, the visual tracking of the mirrored existing limb (say a hand) in the mirror box serves to rebuild neuronal pathways tricking the brain into thinking that the participant is seeing the old hand and it is pain-free. I filmed volunteers (fellow art students, all fully limbed) interacting with the mirror box in any way they pleased. My intention was to capture the peculiar and puzzling visual images of the participants’ reflected hand and inactive hand in the box (figures 2 and 3). The experience for the volunteers was not anticipated. After interacting with the mirror box for some time, some reported an odd dis-connect from their hand in the box (objective reality) and thought the real hand was the mirrored one. This questioning of objective reality by the performers was an interesting side-effect while gathering resources for the final artwork.

Figure 2. Lynden Stone, The mirror box project, resource photographs, 2009. Participants interacting with the mirror box.

Figure 3. Lynden Stone, The mirror box project, resource photographs, 2009. Participants interacting with the mirror box.

I made a number of videos from this footage, including Objective reality (2011) (see DVD Attachment) (figures 4 and 5). In this work, the performers engage in a casual philosophical exchange over a glass of wine. Daachi, the sceptic, challenges Chris, the material rationalist, to think about the nature of his belief in objective reality. The idea of an objective reality means that the physical universe exists even if I was not here to observe it. The difficulty with accepting conventional reality’s idea that the universe is objective and independent of us is that we only know about the existence of things because we have perceived them through our senses. This is true even if someone tells us about something we have not directly perceived, as Daachi points out to Chris in Objective reality; we still perceive the voice and visual image of the teller. I will further explore this idea in Chapter 3 when I discuss my installation Kevin wondered if the moon was there when he wasn’t looking (2010—12) (figure 16).

Figure 4. Lynden Stone, Objective reality 2011, digital video, 2 min 07 sec, video still. For complete video see DVD Attachment.

Figure 5. Lynden Stone, Objective reality 2011, digital video, 2 min 07 sec, video still. For complete video see DVD Attachment.

The video Objective reality operates through an interplay of visual confusion and philosophical propositioning, via the audio track, to ask the viewer to question their belief in objective reality and the role and nature of knowledge. The performers in the video (in their reality) did not discuss objective reality rather, the text was written by me and later dubbed over and read by two of my laptop’s text-to-voice readers. In an otherwise ordinary setting around a table

with friends chatting over a drink, the oddly situated mirror box is enigmatic. This, added to the over saturated colour, image-bloom and the unsophisticated, mismatched dubbing, confounds ordinary perception. This work relies heavily on a didactic approach where the conversation between the two men operates in an instructional way. A method I pursued early in my candidature in order to convey factual aspects of quantum mechanics and theory, my later work has abandoned such an illustrative approach.

The mechanistic world of matter If our knowledge of the world is gleaned through perception, to demonstrate the objective existence of a physical reality without incorporating human perception and the mind seems logically impossible. Nevertheless, at the turn of the twentieth century, the prevailing view among physical scientists was that the world was nothing other than matter.6 Thoughts of the mind were not part of the reality of the world. Tiny billiard-ball particles of matter were understood to interact only through local physical contact with other components in localised regions. Each tiny local part reacts only to the states of its immediate neighbours and does not feel any affect outside its neighbourhood. In this view, the evolution of the physical universe, and of every system in the physical universe, is governed by a vast collection of local processes, each of which is ‘myopic’ in the sense that it ‘sees’ only its immediate neighbours.7

Acceptable theories of physical phenomena could only be given in terms of mechanical interactions of matter in causal relationships. 8 This view was underscored by a continuing subscription to Cartesian dualism that distinguished the physical body from the non-physical mind. Outstanding successes in mechanistic and macroscopic physics and in chemistry overshadowed the obvious fact that thoughts, desires and emotions are not of material substance 9 and therefore are excluded from a view of reality. A materialistic view of a physical universe existing outside our minds persists into contemporary times.10 Chalmers, who has a particular interest in the philosophy of the mind and consciousness, asserts that materialism (or physicalism) is a widely held doctrine of belief that there is nothing else in the world “over and above the physical, or that the physical facts in a certain sense exhaust all the facts about the world”. 11

The natural extension of mechanistic physics leads to the conviction that if we could determine the position and velocity of all atoms of matter in one instant of time, then we would be able to know the fate of the universe.12 If our fate is already determined, it does not matter how or what we think; our thoughts cannot affect the inevitable consequences of a deterministic reality, and what we know or feel is of no consequence. Our experiential qualities correspond to mechanistic workings of our brains that are fixed and determined and [o]ur conscious thoughts thus become prisoners of impersonal microscopic processes: we are, according to this “scientific” view, at least as far as our physical actions are concerned, mechanical robots.13

Materialism points to the conclusion of an objective physical world that excludes my thoughts as part of reality. This means my thinking that I cannot prove an objective reality outside my perception is of no consequence; a material reality exists regardless of what I think. In subsequent chapters, I will discuss my own and others’ works that address the challenge that quantum mechanics and quantum theories pose to the idea that the extent of reality is purely physical and objective. In particular, these works explore the possibility that consciousness is an active agent in the formulation of physical reality.

An adherence to the notion of material reality either ignores the phenomenal aspect of our thoughts or endeavours to explain it in neuro-physical terms. This supports the notion of conventional reality as being mind-independent and objective. But, as I will discuss in later chapters, quantum mechanics and quantum theories challenge this idea. If one is to maintain that the extent of reality is only the physical, objective realm, mental activity must be explained through the material processes of brain activity. Chalmers identifies two aspects of mind; the ‘phenomenal’ concept of mind exemplified by consciously experienced mental states; and the ‘psychological’ concept of the mind being the causal or explanatory basis for behaviour.14 However, while neuroscience has successfully explained many aspects of the psychological aspect, science based on a materialistic and deterministic view of the world has difficulty explaining the uniquely subjective experience relating to the phenomenal concept of the mind as anything other than brain activity.15 During the first half of the twentieth century, the dominant behaviourists school of psychology tried

to solve this problem by rejecting the phenomenal concept, arguing that the psychological concept was all that was necessary to explain mental phenomena. 16 Leading exponent of the behaviourist model, B.F. Skinner rejected the explanation of behaviour in terms of any “mental”, “psychic” or “inner agent” that lacked physical dimensions. He stated that such a concept of the mind was invented for the sole purpose of providing spurious explanations…Since mental and psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason for rejecting them.17

Chalmers attributes the development of behaviourist psychology and earlier, Sigmund Freud’s notion that behaviour could be explained by a variety of unconscious states and his distrust in the veracity of a conscious expression of belief or desire, as establishing “as orthodoxy the idea that explanation of behaviour is in no way dependent on phenomenal notions”. 18 And, although behaviourism, as a theory to explain psychology and learning, had only partial success and has now been succeeded by computational cognitive science, this orthodoxy has, for the most part, been preserved.19 Behavourism and (so far) neuroscience have not explained, in mechanical terms, the phenomenon of mental activity.

Can the idea that the extent of reality is an objective, material and knowable world can be proven? An empiricist account of the world would answer this in the affirmative. Empiricism holds that the only knowledge we can have is gained solely through our experience of the physical world. 20 Therefore, any conclusions we make about an objective, physical world will be based on observations and metaphysical theories behind such observations are to be ignored as a basis of knowledge. Jonathon Keats’ Quantum Entanglements (2011) (figures 48 and 49), which I will discuss at length in Chapter 5, draws attention to a conception of the world based exclusively on empiricism. He invites viewers to interact with his quantum entangling device that, he says, sprays entangled photons onto couples who stand in designated places near the device. 21 The implication is that connected, entangled photons may remain on the participating couple even though they might be subsequently separated. Couples who stand near the device discern no physical experience of it (I have stood near it myself). One cannot verify the presence of entangled photons. Yet,

Keats’ entangled photons are being produced (the device, might, arguably do this) and, he says that any attempt to observe or measure the entanglement phenomena will disentangle the photons. In quantum entanglement, as I will discuss in Chapter 5, measurement or observation will end the entanglement relationship between entangled but separated particles. Keats presents the viewer with the possibility of quantum phenomena but says you cannot know about it specifically, you will just have to have faith in it, so to speak. Quantum entanglement, he indicates, is beyond a material, verifiable reality.

The empiricist account of reality that relies on experience of the phenomenal world has to contend with a counter-argument that experience and observation is subjective and dependent on societal norms.22 Accordingly, to what extent can empiricism result in an objective account of the world? To demonstrate how subjective the world can be even using an empiricist approach, philosopher Norwood Hanson asks us to consider the following: …Johannes Kepler: imagine him on a hill watching the dawn. With him is Tycho Brahe. Kepler regarded the sun as fixed: it was the earth that moved. But Tycho followed Ptolemy and Aristotle in this much at least: the earth was fixed and all other celestial bodies moved around it. Do Kepler and Tycho see the same thing in the east at dawn? …Seeing the dawn was for Tycho and Simplicius to see that the earth’s brilliant satellite was beginning its diurnal circuit around us, while for Kepler and Galileo it was to see that the earth was spinning them back into the light or our local star.23

An empiricist’s verification of reality, it would seem, is subject to their own interpretations of perceptual information and cannot be relied on to prove objective reality.

Proponents of sceptical reasoning, while relying on their own perceptions, know the limits of empiricism. Sceptics doubt that any conclusions can be made about the nature of the physical world and an objective reality beyond one’s own experience and interpretation. Thomas Nagel considered that scepticism always overshadows the quest for objective reality and truth. 24 Contemporary philosopher Stephen Hetherington claims that the logic of sceptical reasoning gives doubt that you can justifiably extrapolate at all from observations. A sceptic on the hill with Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe would not even be certain that dawn will break:

To infer even the sun’s being likely to rise tomorrow is to regard past observations as a reasonably good guide to something as yet unobserved. This is still to assume that the world is not about to change dramatically, even in a probalistic way – that it is not about to start functioning so differently as to make all previous experience badly misleading, even as a guide to understanding how the world will probably be. Yet … [a]t any moment this possibility exists, even of past probabilistic patterns ending, altering unrecogniseably.25

Some sceptics find comfort in living a sceptical life. Others, who might take scepticism to the extreme, live in a state of high anxiety. For this second group, reliance on public-transport timetables, weather forecasts or the ability to make future plans could be problematic. Kevin, the green teddy bear in my installation Kevin wondered if the moon was there when he wasn’t looking (2010—12) (figure 16) is a sceptic: he is not sure if the moon is there when he is not looking. His refusal to simply accept the conventional view of reality as existing independent of his experience of it makes him doubt objective reality. However, Kevin is regarded as an oddball in a world that seems to operate on expectations that past events will be repeated on the basis of empirical experience. Most people, I believe, do not think philosophically about these matters and assume, as an objective fact based on empirical ‘evidence’ that the sun will rise tomorrow. An empirical view of the world supports the idea that the extent of reality is objective and knowable. However, empiricism makes no allowance for anomalous phenomena. For instance, the phenomena of the most successful physical theory in modern physics—quantum mechanics—relies on metaphysical theory and so cannot be explained by empiricism.26

Including the mind in a definition of reality A faith that empiricism explains reality also inevitably requires an acknowledgement that independent objects that exist ‘out there’ for everyone and are independent of our minds. As discussed however, the provability by empirical evidence of objective reality ‘out there’ is problematic. People of a rationalist persuasion, however, would argue that knowledge about the objective world is available through the capacity of pure reason alone, such as logical insight. 27 This assumes some sort of fundamental truth or objective essence hiding in the nature of reality. It also accepts that the mind has a critical role in understanding reality but it somehow does this through tracking the real

essence of an objective reality that is “in no way dependent on beliefs, psychological states, mental representations, etc.”.28 Hetherington says that a rationalist’s answer to whether the sun will rise tomorrow morning would be to “Just think about whether it is.” Having done that, the rationalist would “understand that this sort of regularity is how any world with a sun must function. No further observation or experiment would be needed.”29 In this view, the mind is an active agent in the postulation of a supposedly independent reality. What the ‘real essence’ of objective reality might be depends on whether one believes it is a group of verification-transcendent truths or whether reality extends only to the bounds of our knowledge. Taking the definition I have adopted of conventional reality (of a mind-independent, objective, knowable reality), a person holding a view of a ‘knowable’ reality may hold that view based on personal convictions of unverifiable truths behind objective reality (such as a conviction that the laws of nature are fixed and immutable). Or they may believe that the extent of their reality extends so far as what humankind has discovered about it. In this respect, a knowable reality usually is only revealed by the empiricism of science. Quantum mechanics, in either view, I will argue, challenges the idea of a ‘knowable’ objective reality.

Early in his career, philosopher Hilary Putnam supported a rational view of objective reality. Arguing against scepticism, he asked us to imagine our “brains in the vat” where our reality might be no more than the dreamings of a brain under the control of an evil scientist.30 He used this fanciful imagery to highlight how ridiculous it is to doubt the external world. To be able to formulate such sceptical arguments, he argued, meant that we must be more than brains in vats; we must possess sources and models of reliable knowledge and powers of perception that permit us to formulate conceptual hypotheses. 31 Later, however, Putnam accepted a sceptical viewpoint. 32 Putnam felt that the comforting assumptions of fundamental truths that buttress objective reality are always undercut by the fact that any assessment of objective reality occurs through our mental faculties that cannot be satisfactorily explained by a materialist model.33

Most people would agree that how they think about things, the attitudes they have and the decisions they make have a relationship to their own reality; “[o]ne

of the main reasons for thinking, talking, and theorizing is to work out how to affect and transform things around us”.34 This does not go as far as saying, however, that our thoughts and attitudes themselves can have a material effect on physical reality; this idea seems, in the view of conventional reality, farfetched. But quantum mechanics proposes the possibility of a direct role for the mind in quantum processes and I explore this possibility in my ‘mind works projects’ that I discuss in detail in Chapter 9. In those three works, I offer to the viewer actual quantum events with which they can test this theory by endeavouring to affect or cause material events.

In the course of his influential work 35 on how scientific paradigms are maintained and can change, Thomas Kuhn made the radical global claim that when conceptual paradigms change, it is possible that the physical world changes too. While not specifically referring to the possibility that the mind may interact with quantum effects to affect the material world, Kuhn’s hypothesis resonates with certain theorists’ views on the interaction of mind and matter.36 Kuhn proposed that as a result of paradigm shifts in science, not only our ways of seeing the world changes but also the “concrete results” of experiments.37 This is an extreme claim. Is it just our concept of an objective reality that changes or does the physical make up of the world actually change? Kuhn builds his case by describing the theory of ‘mutual affinity’, the paradigm of chemistry existing in the eighteenth century. He suggests that while chemistry was viewed according to this paradigm, chemical phenomena behaved according to the paradigm.38 This, of course is not surprising: if testing is done according to certain set parameters of understanding and expectation then results will often accord with this, unless experimenters are stepping outside of those parameters. After the paradigm shift in chemistry to John Dalton’s chemical atomic theory, however, Kuhn asserts that, “the very numerical data of chemistry began to shift…. Even the percentage of composition of well-known compounds was different. The data themselves had changed.”39

Arguably, quantum mechanics and the possible interrelationship of mind and matter offer an answer of how this might happen as I will discuss in later chapters (and the Appendix).

Peter Godfrey-Smith (Professor of Philosophy at Harvard) notes that philosophers and commentators are split between attitudes towards Kuhn’s radical idea of the physical world changing because of ideas. 40 One group interprets Kuhn as saying that “changing our views of science requires us to change our metaphysics too – our most basic views about reality”; that the idea of an objective, stable world that persists through various attempts to conceptualise it is outdated. The other group thinks Kuhn’s idea is “a mess” and that it is too farfetched to say the world changes with paradigm shifts.41 In the next chapter, I will develop this idea of the relationship between the mind and reality and the possibility that the fabric of reality could change with thinking via the processes of quantum mechanics.

Consciousness A ‘suspicion’ exists that quantum theory, because of the inextricable relationship between observer and the outcome of what is observed,42 must have something to say about the mind and consciousness. 43 Therefore, establishing the contemporary discourse on the nature of the mind and consciousness and how that fits with our views of a conventional reality is critical to my aims of demonstrating how my works of art that engage with quantum concepts might enable a viewer to doubt that convention. My three ‘mind works projects’ directly address the idea that our mind, through quantum brain processes, interacts with the quantum realm and affects or even creates material reality. These works, offer the viewer a possibility of direct engagement with quantum effects to influence material reality.

Chalmers claims that consciousness is the “biggest mystery” and “may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe”. 44 Neuroscience has made progress into the ‘easy’ problems of consciousness; i.e., how the brain processes environmental stimulation, how it integrates information, and how we produce reports on internal states. However, the “hard” problem of consciousness (a term coined by Chalmers) remains: why is our brain processing accompanied by an experience of inner life?45 Chalmers disagrees with the view that consciousness is an illusion. (It is unlikely that we are being deceived by the trickery of an evil mastermind controlling our brains in a vat.) Rather, he believes “that we are surer of the

existence of conscious experience than we are of anything else in the world”.46 For Chalmers, the experience of consciousness has some intensely real, yet subjective aspect to it that cannot be explained by a purely materialistic view of the world.47 Nor can a materialistic view of the world explain the causal efficacy of consciousness that is exhibited in phenomena such as creativity, ethics and spirituality.48

Neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and Nobel laureate, Roger Sperry, noted that the shift in the 1970s from behaviourism to cognitivism resulted in scientists seeking a legitimate model for consciousness. Under the earlier behaviourist model, conscious experience and subjective awareness had been banned from explanations of science on the basis of “formidable methodological difficulties” required to fit it into the materialist paradigm, which provided “a complete, closed and coherent system” that left no place for subjective consciousness.49 He proposed that consciousness was an emergent property of physical brain states but argued for some kind of inextricable interfusion of consciousness with “physiologic substrates.”50 Sperry’s model preserves the classical paradigm of reducibility and determinism (central to materialism) while proposing a shift from “bottom-up” atomistic determinism to a concept of “reciprocal ‘two-way’ or biodirectional” engagement in the brain whereby “a molecule, for example, rather than being governed solely by its atomic make-up, becomes also the ‘master of its inner atoms’ and electrons”.51 His model, the specific dynamics of which he acknowledged were yet to be explained, endeavoured to overcome what he considered to be the failed attempts to use quantum mechanics to explain consciousness at the point of synaptic junctions between brain cells. Sperry’s view seems to combine a materialist with a metaphysical view to recognise consciousness as emergent yet ultimately physically explained.

Chalmers, however, entertains the possibility of a relationship between quantum mechanics, consciousness and physical reality. Building a case for incorporating consciousness into a broader idea of reality, and one not limited to a mind-independent objective reality, Chalmers argues that the phenomenal aspects of consciousness cannot be adequately explained in a reductive or materialistic way and since it is logically possible for a physically identical world to exist without the presence of consciousness (for example a zombie world)

then consciousness is a fact over and above physical facts about the world.52 For Chalmers, this proves that the concept of materialism is false.53 The failure of materialism leads to acknowledging the dual reality of both physical and non- physical features of the world.54 While consciousness is a feature of the world “over and above the physical”, it is not, for Chalmers, a substance of the world. Yet, it is a phenomenal property that is “ontologically independent of physical properties”. He thinks it is plausible that consciousness might arise from a physical basis “even though it is not entailed by that basis”. 55 Chalmers entertains the possibility that quantum mechanics “might play a role in characterising the psychophysical link” between consciousness and the physical world56 and I will discuss his and others’ views in more detail in the next chapter.

High-profile and influential philosophers John Searle,57 and Daniel Dennett58 and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, 59 hold contemporary materialist views. They are against any inclusion of consciousness as a metaphysical component of reality over and above material aspects. This is contrary to possibilities suggested by some quantum theorists. While they differ on specifics, they all consider that mental states are a result of material processes of the brain and anything that we acknowledge as consciousness does not exist outside the brain. For them, there is no possibility of a dualism of physical things and mental things. Brain activities cause consciousness but consciousness is not some extra substance or entity; it is just a higher-level feature of the system that is made up of the lower-level neuronal elements. In their analysis, and contrary to Chalmer’s view, consciousness is entailed in physical processes. Richard Dawkins believes that as a result of evolution, the brain’s capacity to simulate has resulted in subjective consciousness but why this is so is “the most profound mystery facing modern biology”.60 Dennett, previously known for his metaphor of the brain as a computer, has recently deviated from this line of thinking a bit, and has speculated the possibility that individual neurons in our brains are independent, non-reductive, have some autonomy, and can be rebellious; “competition can occur amongst individual neurons that allows thinking outside the box”.61 Dennett, however, has not gone so far as to add a metaphysical component to his philosophy, since the neuronal activity he is suggesting “could be due to some kind of releases of control genes that are in

the individual neurons”.62 Searle says, “We should think of consciousness as part of our ordinary biological history, along with digestion, growth, mitosis and meiosis.”63

As evidenced here, there is little agreement among philosophers and physical scientists over how to define the extent of reality. Reality may simply be composed entirely of physical matter and consciousness may not exist at all. Or, the subjective phenomenal aspect of consciousness might be nothing more than the result of brain processes. But while historical reasons for this view exist, it does not seem to accord with my phenomenal experience of reality. Reality, then, may comprise both physical and nonphysical components. Some consider non-physical components are knowable or ultimately discoverable as fundamental truths. Others believe that reality cannot extend past the limits of our knowledge as ascertained through our senses. Some consider that consciousness, as part of an extended reality, may have some role in interpreting reality or even affecting reality. It is arguable that consciousness — our thoughts and mind processes — are part of a broader reality unrecognised by the conventional view of reality that insists on a knowable yet objective, independent and external-to-mind physical world. On the basis of conventional reality, most people consider that they have no role or capacity in materially affecting or creating physical reality.

Quantum mechanics gives serious reasons to doubt conventional reality as knowable, mind-independent and objective. Artworks that propose that reality extends into the metaphysical realm or that reality may not be objective or entirely knowable or that suggest a role for consciousness in affecting or creating materiality will enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality. In subsequent chapters, I will discuss artworks by me and by others that suggest such breaks with convention, building up to Chapter 9, where I will focus on the ‘mind works projects’ that specifically challenge the conventional view that a viewer has no role or capacity in materially affecting or creating physical reality.

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1 David Chalmers is also Director of the Centre for Consciousness at Australian National University and co-director of the Centre for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. His areas of research are: philosophy of mind and language, consciousness, metaphysics and epistemology, and the foundations of cognitive science. Source: David Chalmer’s homepage: http://www.consc.net/chalmers/ 2 David Chalmers, “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature,” in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, ed. Stephen Stich and Ted Warfield (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 103. 3 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search Of a Fundamental Theory. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4. 4 Bernard d’Espagnat, “Quantum Physics and Reality,” Foundations of Physics 41, no.11 (November 2011): 1703–1716 at 1712-1713. 5 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 61. 6 Eugene Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 168. 7 Henry Stapp, “Attention, Intention and Will in Quantum Physics,” Cornell University Library, (1999) , arXiv:quant-ph/9905054, 1. 8 Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 16. 9 Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” 168. 10 Rupert Sheldrake, “Setting Science Free From Materialism,” The Journal of Science and Healing 9, no. 4 (2013): 211—218; Ervin Lazlo, “In Defense of Intuition: Exploring the Physical Foundation of Spontaneous Apprehension,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 23, no. 1 (2009): 51—52; Jeffrey Schwartz, Henry Stapp and Mario Beauregard, “Quantum Physics in Neuroscience and Psychology: A Neurophysical Model of Mind–Brain Interaction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 360 (2005): 1325, doi:10.1098/rstb.2004.1598; Amit Goswami, “Physics Within Nondual Consciousness,” Philosophy East & West, 51 no. 4 (2001): 535–544 at 535; Chalmers, “The Conscious Mind,” 168—171; Evgenii Feinberg, Art in the Science Dominated World: Science, Logic and Art, trans, J. A. Cooper (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1987). 11 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 41. 12 Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” 168. 13 Stapp, “Attention, Intention and Will in Quantum Physics,” 2. 14 David Chalmers, “Consciousness and its Place in Nature,” in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, ed. Stephen Stich and Ted Warfield, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 11. 15 Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion (London: Coronet, 2012), 212. 16 Chalmers, “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature,” 11. 17 B.F. Skinner, “Science and Human Behavior,” The B.F. Skinner Foundation. http://www.bfskinner.org/bfskinner/Society_files/Science_and_Human_Behavior .pdf, accessed 11 August 2013. 18 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 14. 19 Ibid. 20 Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality, 8.

21 AC Institute, “Jonathon Keats: QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENTS,” http://www.artcurrents.org, accessed 7 May 2011. 22 Ernst Gombrich, Art & Illusion – A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1959), 331. 23 Norwood Russell Hanson, “Observation,” in Modernism Criticism Realism: Alternative Contexts for Art, ed. Charles Harrison and Fred Orton (London: Harper & Row, 1984), 70—71, 76. 24 Cited in Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: epistemological realism and the basis of skepticism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 56. I owe my reference to Christopher Norris, Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism. (London: Routledge, 2000), 172n28. 25 Stephen Hetherington, Yes, But How Do You Know? (Buffalo: Broadview Press, 2009), 44. 26 Bas C. Van Frassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1980), 2. 27 Hetherington, Yes, But How Do You Know?, 52. 28 Norris, Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism, 170. 29 Ibid. 30 Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 31 Norris, Quantum Theory and the Flight From Realism, 172. 32 Ibid., 163—88. 33 Note that other means of explaining mental phenomena have been extensively investigated, in particular phenomenology. However, necessary limits on this exegesis prevent me from delving into this theory and I am concentrating on an examination of the materialistic model to explain the dominant paradigm of conventional reality. 34 Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality, 174. 35 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). 36 Wolfgang Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, ed. Charles P. Enz and Karl von Meyenn, trans. Robert Schlapp (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994) 149- 164; John Archibald Wheeler, “Law without Law,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 182–213; Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: An Alternative to Materialism,” Zygon, 41, no. 3 (2006): 599–615, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9744.2005.00762.x; Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: II: The Libet and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Causal Anomalies,” Erkenntnis, 65 (2006): 117–42, doi: 10.1007/s10670-006- 9017-y; John von Neumann, 1955, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955); Evan Harris Walker, The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge: Perseus, 2000); Eugene Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1967), 171—84; Amit Goswami, “Physics Within Nondual Consciousness,” Philosophy East & West, 51 no. 4 (2001): 535—44; Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006).

37 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 130. 38 Ibid., 134. 39 Ibid., 134—35. 40 Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality, 96. 41 Ibid. 42 The relationship of the observer and the outcome of observation will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3. 43 C.U.M. Smith, “The ‘Hard Problem’ and the Quantum Physicist. Part 1: The First Generation,” Brain and Cognition 61 (2006): 182. 44 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, xi. 45 Ibid., xii; Smith, “The ‘Hard Problem’ ,” 181. 46 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, xii. 47 Ibid., xiv. 48 Goswami, “Physics Within Nondual Consciousness,” 536. 49 Roger Sperry, “Holding Course Amid Shifting Paradigms,” in New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, ed. Willis Harman and Jane Clark (Sausalito: Institute of Noetic Sciences, 1994), 110. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 123. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 124. 55 Ibid., 125, original emphasis. 56 Ibid., 333. 57 John Searle is currently Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. 58 Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett is currently Professor of Philosophy at Tufts, co- Director, Centre for Cognitive Studies. 59 Richard Dawkins is Emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 to 2008. 60 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 59. 61 Daniel Dennett, “The Normal Well-Tempered Mind,” The Edge, 8 January 2013, http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-normal-well-tempered-mind 62 Ibid. 63 John Searle, “The Problem of Consciousness,” Social Research 60, no.1 (1993): 3—16.

Chapter 3 Conceptual foundation and engagement — quantum superposition

The purpose of this exegesis is to answer the question: “how can visual art that engages with quantum concepts enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality?” Consequently, I focus on artists or artworks that overtly engage with quantum concepts. Of course some artists might stumble on a successful representation of quantum concepts without overtly intending to do so. However, these kinds of serendipitous representations are generally outside the ambit of my concern here. The exception is Daniel Crooks’ video work Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) (2010) (figures 7, 8 and 9) which I discuss later in this chapter.

An artwork’s overt engagement with quantum concepts is often revealed in its title or in an artist’s statements that accompanies it. I argue that an artist’s clear, basic understanding of a quantum concept reflected in their work is the necessary starting point for an artist engaging in quantum concepts. I do not mean, however, that the artwork should be illustrative of the science behind it. If the artist misunderstands the conceptual basis then the artwork cannot be a successful engagement and may only confuse the viewer as to why quantum mechanics and theory demands a re-evaluation of conventional reality. In this, and the next two chapters, I will analyse the quantum conceptual basis of artworks by others and by me, and whether or not that basis is clearly reflected in the artworks. Most of these artworks will be revisited in Chapters 6, 7 and 8 where I will discuss the tools and devices used by the artist in question (particularly evoking unconventional thinking and the considered use of materials and metaphor) to enable a viewer to doubt material reality.

I will address artworks that demonstrate, or fail to demonstrate, an engagement with quantum mechanical and theoretical concepts within the following framework. In this chapter, I will focus on particular artworks where the artist seeks to examine the particular quantum concept that our world, at a fundamental level, is in states of pre-material superposition of multiple possibilities that, somehow, through collapse of superposition, become the singular reality that we experience. Not all physicists agree that quantum superposition collapses, and in Chapter 4, I discuss artworks in terms of their

engagement with the non-collapse, many-worlds theory. Following this, in Chapter 5, I discuss artworks where the conceptual basis of the artworks is quantum entanglement.

Quantum man American artist and physicist Julian Voss-Andreae has made a series of sculptural works about the phenomenon of quantum superposition. One example from the series is Quantum Man (2007) (figure 6); it embodies Voss- Andreae’s idea of what we might see if the “wave/particle duality” of quantum superposition was detectable at a macroscopic scale.1 The idea of wave/particle duality is not an accurate description of quanta since quanta have no physical properties. Rather, the idea reflects the result that we see in the macroscopic world once quantum behaviour has been observed or recorded. That is, either a quantum event is observed to be a particle or exhibits wave-like behaviour in the macroscopic world. Nevertheless, the wave/particle duality model is now an accepted visual model for physicists and lay people alike to conceptualise particular pre-collapse quantum behaviour. In Chapters 6 and 8, I specifically discuss the problematic use of metaphors, including metaphors that rely on models from mathematics and physics in describing quantum concepts. Suffice to say, that visual metaphors for quantum behaviour and the quantum realm have no equivalence in the physical world (or are currently outside our ability to conceptualise). Physicists make do with models that are inaccurate but nevertheless provide some understanding.

Figure 6. Julian Voss-Andreae, Quantum Man 2007, stainless steel, 250 x 110 x 50cm. Photograph courtesy Julian Voss-Andreae

The idea of quanta existing in a wave/particle duality arises from a test originally devised to explain the nature of light. This test is the definitive means of demonstrating the dual wave/particle nature of quanta when they are in a state of superposition (that is when all possibilities exist and before the apparent collapse of superposition).

Photons, a form of quanta, are the constituents of light. Before the twentieth century, some scientists, such as Thomas Young, thought light was a wave, spread out and variable in space and time. Others, who supported the longstanding idea of Sir Isaac Newton, believed light to be corpuscular, made of small discrete particles that would have a definite position in space over time. This latter theory was helped by the existence of sharp shadows. If light was a wave, then it would bend around objects and shadows ought to be fuzzy. But in 1801, Young was able to demonstrate the wave characteristics of light: he showed that two linked sources of light produced an interference pattern similar to the interaction of intersecting ripples of water in a pond. Where ripples overlap in a pond, interference occurs, producing a distinctive pattern. Young observed that where light from two sources overlapped, rather than a distinct area of illumination, there was a series of interference bands of light and dark areas. The distance between the bands enabled Young to estimate the wavelength of light to be very small. This explained the sharp shadows cast by

light. Waves of light will bend around objects that are the same size as their wavelength (one millionth of a metre). But we cannot see objects this small; we only see much larger objects blocking light with sharp edges of shadows and no bending.2

Young’s experiments did not settle the issue of ‘wave or particle’ nature of light. In 1905, Albert Einstein relied on the particle theory of light to explain the photoelectric effect for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. 3 Experiments indicating the corpuscular nature of light are easy to demonstrate in a physics laboratory. Lasers can be attenuated to emit a single photon at a time. When a laser is aimed at a detection screen, a single photon is emitted intermittently, and single flashes of light on the detector screen can be observed, suggesting the particle nature of light.4

The ‘double-slit experiment’ was able to reconcile the two contradictory experiments, supporting the idea that light behaves like a wave and also like a particle. It also shows the oddness of quantum behaviour and the beginnings of our doubts about conventional reality. In very simple terms, the double-slit experiment can be set up as follows: a laser beam is aimed at a detector screen. In between the laser and the screen is a barrier with two tiny, side-by- side slits that allow light to pass through. To test whether light is a particle, measurement devices are set up beside the two slits to find out through which slit light might travel. These measurement devices can be turned on and off. When turned on, photons are recorded as travelling through one or the other slit. The screen further on also records flashes of light, indicating that light has travelled through one of the slits and onto the detector screen. However, when the measurement devices are turned off and a beam of light is aimed through the slits, over time, a wave pattern is physically detected on the screen, indicating the overlap of light travelling through each slit and combining in apparent waves before hitting the detector screen, thus seemingly confirming the wave-like nature of light.

It is possible to tune the laser emitting the light so that only a single photon is ever within the bounds of the experiment at one time. With the ‘which slit?’ devices turned on, it is possible to determine the precise path of the photon and

single flashes of light are physically detected on the screen. When the measurement devices at the slits are turned off, however, over time the banded wave interference pattern re-appears. This leads to the startling result that a single photon, interfering with itself, creates an interference pattern. In the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics, the double-slit experiment leads to the conclusion that the physical nature of elementary particles cannot be ascertained until they are measured and prior to measurement they do not exist in any ascertainable material form. Quanta are in a pre-material superposition of all possibilities. Perpetuating the wave/particle visual model, the multiple possibilities of superposition are described in the formalism of quantum mechanics as the wavefunction prior to its observation and resolution in the macroscopic world as either being particle or wave-like in nature.

In 1999, Voss-Andreae was then a postgraduate physicist with Anton Zeilinger’s experimental physics group in Vienna. He was part of a team that demonstrated in a double-slit experiment that the microscopically visible buckminsterfullerene molecules 5 could be shown to exhibit the dual properties of wave-like and particle behaviour. At the time, this was an extraordinary result. Never before had large, microscopically visible molecules been shown to demonstrate quantum superposition.

Voss-Andreae says his sculpture Quantum Man (2007) (figure 6) is a visualisation of what the quantum wavefunction of a walking person might look like.6 This larger-than-life sculpture is made of thin, welded sections of metal. When it is viewed front-on, the metal form fills out and occupies the space almost as one solid form. However, viewed from the side, the figure wondrously all but disappears, leaving only fine slivery waves, suggesting a human figure. Like the superposed state of fundamental particles suggested by the double-slit experiment, Quantum Man, when viewed from different perspectives, suggests the solid materiality of particles or the expansive spreading nature of waves.

Julian Voss-Andreae’s involvement as a physicist using buckminsterfullerene molecules in the double-slit experiment has informed this and other works he has made.7 He had first-hand exposure to the idea that objects, detectable by the human eye (albeit with a microscope), exist in a form not consistent with

conventional reality. Recently, physicists have demonstrated that quantum superposition is observable in increasingly larger objects; even tiny objects are observable with the naked eye.8 The dividing line between the imperceptible quantum reality and the macroscopic has been redrawn. Using the visual model of the wavefunction, Voss-Andreae’s Quantum Man successfully poses the question of where this dividing line of quantum collapse might be.

Seek stillness in movement Working out where the quantum world of superposition ends and the material macroscopic world we perceive begins continues to confound scientists. Physicists Kofler and Brukner say that, because the buckminsterfullerene experiments quantum effects are being demonstrated in increasingly larger macroscopic objects, the classical world (i.e., the non-quantum macroscopic world) could be made up of quantum states of superposition undetectable by coarse measuring devices, such as our eyes.9 Australian artist Daniel Crooks’ digital video Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) (2010) (figures 7, 8 and 9) could indicate both the perpetuation of the wavefunction model of quantum superposition and this fluid dividing line between that and macroscopic reality. In the work, Crooks decelerates time by taking slivers of video sequences and expanding them across the entire frame. In this way, figures stretch through space and time, persisting at points longer than we would normally perceive. They exhibit a fluid, elastic motion, expanding and contracting as if superposition is enduring, not collapsing.

Figure 7. Daniel Crooks Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) 2010, digital video, 5:23 min, 16:9, 1080p24, video still, Stereo. Photograph courtesy Daniel Crooks and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Figure 8. Daniel Crooks, Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) 2010, digital video, 5:23 min, 16:9, 1080p24, video still, Stereo. Photograph courtesy Daniel Crooks and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Figure 9. Daniel Crooks, Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) 2010, digital video, 5:23 min, 16:9, 1080p24, video still, Stereo. Photograph courtesy Daniel Crooks and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) was shown at the 2010 Sydney Biennale, and I spoke to Crooks at the Biennale about his work, following an artist’s talk that he presented. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the work does not specifically relate to quantum superposition. Rather, it is to convey time and space and to shift viewers’ ideas about these concepts. He says he wants to offer a different way of looking at the world to indicate that “the model we have evolved is not the only way of perceiving this dance of energy that we call the world”.10 In his artist’s statement for a similarly constructed work, he said that he endeavours to trigger a perceptual shift in our viewing of the space/time continuum, graphically revealing the underlying rhythms and patterns of the physical world and tracing rhythms of our navigation through it.11

In Crooks’ video, a man moves languidly, as if walking through viscous gel. However, as he moves through space, it is the man’s form, and not the invisible substance through which he moves, that is impacted by the movement. The trails of his image suggest the persistence of quantum superposition states in which constituent parts are spread out, indeterminate but coherently linked. Even though it was not Crooks’ intention, for me, the video conjures a compelling visual rendering of the humanly imperceptible state of superposition.

The changing but wholly connected image evokes inter-related, flowing states in which possibilities for movement exist throughout.

Thus far, I have been discussing artworks that engage with the idea of the dual nature of quantum superposition. However it is necessary to briefly explain the concept of superposition collapse in order to discuss artworks that deal with this concept.

In the macroscopic world we live in, we do not readily observe quantum superposition;12 it appears to have collapsed into single material actuality. The process of how and why quantum superposition collapses (if, in fact, it does) is not presently understood by science. Various theories of how the quantum superposed state of multiple possibilities resolves into a single state of actuality that we experience can be grouped into two propositions: either quantum superposition does collapse or it does not. The main competing collapse theories propose that collapse is caused by either the act of measurement or observation (regarded as the orthodox theory of collapse)13 or the specific mind or consciousness of the observer, 14 or by mixture with the macroscopic environment (without the necessity for an observer). 15 This last theory of environmental collapse attempts to retain some level of physical objectivity into the idea of quantum mechanics but the mechanism for this collapse theory is yet to be satisfactorily explained and increasing experimental results in demonstrating quantum superposition at scales now readable with the naked eye 16 means the line between superposition and collapse is unclear. David Chalmers believes that the “only remotely tenable criterion that has been proposed” for collapse of quantum superposition relates to consciousness.17

The double-slit experiment The idea that fundamental particles are indeterminate, unknowable and in a superposed state until observed and that the outcome has some relationship to the choice and observation of the observer, strikes directly at the idea of conventional reality. In conventional reality, objects have definite, knowable characteristics, not dependent on our choice of experiment or observed result.

Physicist, Nobel Laureate and Caltech Professor, Richard Feynman asserts that the double-slit experiment contains the “heart” of quantum mechanics and that, “In reality, it contains the only mystery.”18 Feynman says about the experiment, We cannot explain the mystery in the sense of ‘explaining’ how it works. We will tell you how it works. In telling you how it works we will have told you about the basic peculiarities of all quantum mechanics.19

I was inspired by Feynman’s certainty that the double-slit experiment is at the core of quantum mechanics’ challenge to conventional reality. I resolved to use Feynman’s approach that in telling how the experiment works tells of the peculiarities of quantum mechanics. The double-slit experiment, (2011) (figures 10, 11 and 12 and DVD Attachment) is a ‘mockumentary’ about the experiment and its peculiarities presented by a number of people apparently knowledgeable in the subject. However, in reality, the performers did not discuss the double-slit experiment and I wrote the text and later dubbed it over. It is read by my laptop’s text-to-voice readers which provide tinny, digital, yet strangely authoritative, voices. As in the earlier video work, Objective reality (figures 4 and 5) described in Chapter 2, I took the approach of conveying some basic information about the nature of the experiment but in a playful way.

Figure 10. Lynden Stone The double-slit experiment 2011, digital video, 4:34 min, video still

Figure 11. Lynden Stone, The double-slit experiment 2011, digital video, 4:34 min, video still

Figure 12. Lynden Stone, The double-slit experiment 2011, digital video, 4:34 min, video still

I asked performers to interact, in any way they wished, with the mirror box. As I described in Chapter 2, the mirror box is a device used in physical therapy to assist with the neurological phenomenon known as phantom limb pain. My only

instruction to the performers was that they place one hand and arm inside the box and the other hand and arm on the mirror side.

Told through various presenters, the script for The double-slit experiment outlines the nature of the mystery of the experiment. Despite the (possibly) overly instructive nature of this work contained in the script, the vehicle of video and audio track is helpful to convey, from my point of view, the informative aspect of the work. The double-slit experiment is perceptually confounding. Visually, it bears no logical relationship to the audio track although there is some very basic attempt to match speech to body and mouth movements. The mirror box is a perplexing and unexplained element and, through its use, each speaker appears to have the possibility of three hands. This, added to the hyper-real saturation of colour, pixilation of image and deliberately unsophisticated, mismatched audio dubbing, bewilders ordinary perception and presents an alternate visual reality. I intended that these devices would hold the viewer’s attention, which would allow the details of the experiment to be told through the audio track.

Schrödinger’s cat In British artist David Shrigley’s I’m dead (2007) (figure 13) a stuffed cat, standing upright, holds a placard with its front paws bearing the words “I’m dead”. The cat, the best of what taxidermy can offer, looks simultaneously alive and determined to make its point that it is dead. I understand this work to be an expression of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment that is reasonably well known within popular culture as indicating a dual state of being dead and alive at once. Austrian physicist and a founding father of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger devised the cat-in-a-box thought experiment. Schrödinger’s experiment highlights what he considered to be the absurd idea that the cat was, prior to being observed, in a state of dual reality.20

Figure 13. David Shrigley I’m dead 2007, taxidermied cat, wooden sign, acrylic paint dimensions variable

Schrödinger imagined a cat in a closed box that contains a radioactive source and a Geiger counter, which is connected to a triggering device linked to a hammer and a vial of cyanide. If the Geiger counter detects the decay of a radioactive particle, Schrödinger envisaged, the triggering device will release the hammer that will swing and smash the vial, releasing poisonous cyanide gas into the box. Once the box is sealed, it is impossible to ascertain if the Geiger counter has detected the decay of a radioactive particle. Without knowing this, then ordinarily we would assume that the cat is either dead or alive. But if an observer is essential for quantum collapse into a single state of material reality, the formalism of quantum mechanics indicates that until someone looks into the box, one cannot say that the cat is either dead or alive.

The cat is in an unknown and unknowable state until observed, neither dead nor alive.

Shrigley’s I’m dead uses tragicomedy to invite the viewer to consider how visual images can convey a meaning of reality (here, the sense of the cat’s aliveness) and yet be made of inert, lifeless material. I’m dead is like a slap in the face to the viewer. Analogous to Schrödinger’s point of the absurdity of the cat being in the possible states of being dead and alive at the same time, Shrigley’s cat says, “Of course I’m dead. See the sign? It would be stupid of you to think otherwise.” I believe that I’m dead successfully expresses the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment and Schrödinger’s sentiments.

Erwin’s puss My own representations of Schrödinger’s thought experiment, Erwin’s puss (2011) (figure 14) and And dead (2011) (figure 15 and DVD Attachment) does not sympathise with Schrödinger’s scepticism. They appeal to the possibility of dual dead/alive states until observed. Prior to measuring a quantum system, we cannot know anything for certain about the system or the state of quanta. The objective reality of quanta particles does not exist; rather, it is expressed as the wavefunction. We can only know something specific about a quantum system after measurement. As Werner Heisenberg said, the idea of an objectively existing quantum realm, has thus evaporated in a curious way, not into the fog of some new, obscure, or not yet understood reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of the elementary particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.21

Our knowledge of the system replaces any concept of an objective reality. The determination of fundamental properties of the world prior to observation is put into doubt by quantum mechanics. This does not mean that reality does not exist; rather, an unobserved reality is radically different to the conventional reality with which we are familiar.

Figure 14. Lynden Stone Erwin’s puss 2011, oil on canvas 100 cm x 150cm. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Erwin’s puss (figure 14) is now housed in the hallway entrance to the Centre for Quantum Dynamics at Griffith University, Nathan campus. The large cat in the painting (Jacquesimo, my brother’s cat) crouches within the confines of a rectangular box defined by the canvas. His body and half his head is a strange x-ray-like skeleton in hot cadmium green. A radioactive decay product is represented as travelling through the image as a large white comet. If detected by the Geiger counter, it could lead to the release of deadly cyanide. The wavefunction, mimicked in wave-like green stripes, of both possible states are represented. The cat is thus represented in two states; alive and alert or dead and skeletal.

Figure 15. Lynden Stone And dead 2011, digital video, 3:06 min, media player, metal box (11 x 20 x 16cm), video still

My installation And dead (figure 15 and DVD Attachment) is another reference to Schrödinger’s cat. In this work, the viewer must peep into a small eye-hole in a black metal box to see a video playing on a small media player. The neon text “ALIVE” flashes intermittently. Some of the letters are faulty and flash erratically. The accompanying audio is the buzz of a faulty neon sign. The requirement for the viewer to peep through the hole into the box simulates the supposed necessity for the observer to collapse the quantum superposition into one state of possibilities of states that the cat is both dead and alive. Like the hapless cat in the box, the ‘alive’ or working status of the faulty neon is in doubt.

Kevin wondered if the moon was there when he wasn’t looking If an observer is necessary to collapse quantum superposition, what happens when something, such as the moon, is not being looked at, observed or measured? I investigate this idea in my painting and video installation, Kevin wondered if the moon was there when he wasn’t looking (2010—12) (figure 16).

If physical reality might be linked to conscious observation, rather than existing mind-independently, does this mean that observation collapses quantum superposition for all time? Could it be that superposition is re-established when no observation is being made? If this could be the case, what happens when something, such as the moon, is not being looked at, observed or measured? Einstein was troubled by the idea that the conscious mind of the experimenter might enter into the experiment to determine the physical outcome. He thought

the field of quantum mechanics must be incomplete because “no reasonable definition of reality” could be based on whether or not something is observed or measured.22 Einstein refused to believe in a subjective universe where material reality could be created by observation or measurement. He famously asked quantum physicist Abraham Pais whether Pais thought the moon existed only when he looked at it.23

Kevin wondered if the moon was there when he wasn’t looking is installed at adult chest height and consists of two parts. The small media player, affixed to the wall by a black metal box, shows the moon rising from right to left in a loop, seemingly casting a moon beam onto a bright cadmium-green bear painted on the accompanying wooden panel installed to the right of the media player. The panel juts out from the wall by twelve centimetres or so. Kevin, the green teddy bear endlessly wonders if the moon is there when he is not looking. Meanwhile, the moon continues to rise to his left. Does it exist objectively or is the viewer implicated, through their act of observation, in creating the material reality of the moon? Could material reality reassume its superposition if there is no one to observe it?

Antony Gormley’s large steel sculpture Quantum Cloud (figure 18), a work that I will discuss in detail later in this chapter, makes a similar point. When I look away from the steel cloud, does material reality dissolve and the wavefuntion re-established because I am not looking? In classical physics, it is assumed that physical systems have pre-existing material characteristics independent of other systems that can be ascertained by observation and measurement. In the quantum world, however, there is no predetermined definite state. Contrary to our usual experience of conventional reality, it is only the interaction with a measuring device that yields definite, physical results. 24 This is not such a preposterous idea and the possibility, that a collapsed state might be restored to initial superposition, has been examined by physicists recently.25 Chalmers proposes the possibility that until consciousness evolved, the entire universe was in a state of giant superposition.26

The superposition of Neville’s brain, also known as Wigner’s friend

In The superposition of Neville’s brain, also known as Wigner’s friend (2010— 13) (figure 17), one of two works I have made concerning my father, I capture the idea of uncollapsed, linked superposed systems and the unique role human observation might play in collapse of superposition. Nobel laureate and Princeton University physicist Eugene Wigner was of the view that human consciousness was the active agent of collapse of quantum superposition and the answer to the measurement problem.27 He devised a thought experiment (now known as ‘Wigner’s friend’) to demonstrate what he believed to be the unique role of the conscious observer at the point of superposition collapse. Wigner postulated that only the intervention of human consciousness can break the infinity of unobserved quantum possibilities to register a definite response.28

Wigner was troubled by the formalism of superposition that indicated multiple, interlocking systems could join to form larger sets of superposition. 29 For example, it could be said that the experiment + measuring apparatus + the observer + the laboratory could all form one larger state of superposition to an observer outside the system. If further systems could be added on, ad infinitum, at what point does this final observation and collapse of superposition take place? To Wigner, this view seemed untenable with our experience of a single reality that we all seem to share and agree upon, for the most part.

Wigner’s thought experiment demonstrates what he considered to be the unique role of consciousness in the collapse of superposition states into single actuality. Wigner proposed that instead of you undertaking an experiment to determine one of two possible states of an electron, you ask a friend to conduct the experiment. The experiment involves observing, or not observing a flash to determine the state of the electron. Until you interact with your friend, the most you can know about the experiment is the total system of the electron, the measuring device and the friend, all represented by one wavefunction, all in superposition. According to the formalistic rules of quantum mechanics, the experimental set up + your friend + your friend’s knowledge is all in a superposed state and is not collapsed until you ask your friend the outcome of the experiment. However, if you then ask your friend “What did you feel about the flash before I asked you?”, the friend would, no doubt, reply “I told you already, I did [or did not] see a flash”.30 Wigner concluded that despite your

view of the system being in superposition prior to asking your friend, there could be only one proper wavefunction for the system. Your friend was not in a state of suspended animation and your friend’s consciousness had already collapsed the superposition on her measurement.

Wigner’s view was that we appear to all share and experience a similar, agreed- upon reality (he disagreed with solipsism). Therefore, the being with consciousness must have a different role in quantum mechanics than the inanimate measuring device. So while everyone can potentially collapse superposition, once it collapses, it does so into the same reality for everyone. However, Wigner did not suggest the specific mechanics of how consciousness interacts with quantum superposition, a discussion I take up in Chapter 9.

Wigner’s thought experiment is the basis for The superposition of Neville’s brain, also known as Wigner’s friend (2010—13) (figure 17). In this work, Neville (my father as a young biochemist) stares down the barrel of a clunky, analogue microscope. He holds a pencil above paper, as if recording something. On his head he wears a cap protruding with electrodes and wires. The cap and wires, too big for the constraints of the canvas, need to be accommodated by the addition of a wooden extension above the frame. Wires and electrodes feed into a thicker wire that emerges from the left side of the frame. This wire feeds into a small black box with a peephole. Inside the box, single, random, white flashes of light occasionally appear on a small screen. Neville seems to be undertaking an experiment and making an observation. The viewer, by placing an eye to the peephole, can, according to mathematical formalism, become joined in a superposed state with Neville and his apparatus. At what point does superposition collapse?

If consciousness has a special role to play in superposition collapse, has Neville collapsed it by looking into the microscope; or, if consciousness has no role in collapse, is the linked system (Neville + microscope + Neville’s knowledge + electrode cap + video screen) in (metaphorical) superposition until the viewer looks through the peephole to see the flashes? Is the viewer then linked into an un-collapsed superposition by looking into the box? If the viewer’s friend is in the gallery, does the friend see the viewer as included in a superposed system until such time as the viewer tells the friend what he or she sees in the box? What if they are both waiting to be joined by another friend who is not yet in the gallery? From this outside friend’s perspective is Neville + microscope + Neville’s knowledge + electrode cap + video screen + viewer + friend + gallery in one giant superposition until this friend arrives to ask what is seen by the viewer in the peephole? This constant inflation of superposed systems was the impetus for Wigner’s theory of collapse by a unique consciousness.

Admittedly, The superposition of Neville’s brain, also known as Wigner’s Friend requires knowledge of the idea of quantum superposition and Wigner’s thought experiment. However, on an elementary level, without knowledge of those two ideas, it operates to interrogate the metaphysical idea that consciousness might be an active agent, part of a broader metaphysical reality, the activity of which we can see in the flashes on the screen. It also allows the viewer, in peeping through the hole, to feel linked and intimate to the workings of Neville’s brain; this is quite a different experience of conventional reality where we do not experience the conscious occurrences of others.

Quantum Dada and Quantum Clouds When visual artists attempt to represent the counter-intuitive nature of pre- material quantum superposition and collapse, the results are not always successful. In July and October 2010, two phases of the group exhibition Quantum Dada were held at two private galleries in Houston Texas. Without seeing the exhibition, I rely on a review of the first phase by Michael Bise, art critic, visual artist and contributor to Glasstire, an online Houston visual art magazine.31 The curatorial premise of the exhibition was that The connection between the quantum world and Dada is the nature of consciousness. Quantum physics depends on a conscious observer to set in motion essential quantum reactions, such as wave function collapse, in order to create a reality, as we know it. Dada represents one of the highest levels of consciousness, human creativity, and is ready to jump into the breach.32

I suspect the point of the exhibition was to use the random, erratic nature of the Dada art form that is meant to stream, without consideration for logic, from the mind of the artist and to link it to the idea that the conscious observer collapses quantum superposition. Bise does not think the exhibition successfully fulfils the curatorial brief. He points out that the curator’s working definition of Dada is so vague and the actions of quantum mechanics so universal that any work of art might be made to represent some aspect of one idea or the other in his exhibition.33

Bise mentions several works in the show that fail to give a clear understanding of quantum mechanics. For instance, the curator, Volker Eisele’s own work 10– 34 (2010) (vinyl holy grail number of quantum mechanics with receipt; dimensions variable) consists of the number ‘10–34’ affixed to the wall in

adhesive vinyl. Below this is a framed receipt for the purchase of the vinyl. ‘10– 34 ’ is Planck’s constant, an essential term that describes the smallest unit of action in quantum mechanics. Bise’s criticism of this work was that “taking a numerical value out of its scientific context and playing a tired Duchampian trick with the receipt for the purchase of the materials” did not “represent a meaningful synthesis of quantum mechanics and Dada” and he concluded that the artist was careless in his conflation of science and culture.... Quantum mechanics is so specific a field of inquiry that to casually conflate it with the equally specialized study of art yields connections that are tenuous at best and intellectually irresponsible at worst.34

If artworks are to assist in an understanding of quantum mechanics and the doubt that it throws on conventional reality, it seems clearly articulated concept and expression is essential, something that was apparently lacking in the Quantum Dada exhibition.

A more successful application of quantum concepts is Gormley’s series of Quantum Cloud sculptures 35 that investigate wave/particle duality and the possibly subjective nature of quantum reality through observer collapse. Part of that series, Quantum Cloud (1999) (figure 18), was commissioned for a site over the Thames River beside the Millennium Dome in London. During construction of the work, Gormley was reported as saying (presumably with tongue in cheek) that, as the work was based on quantum uncertainty, he did not know whether a body would be discernable in the cloud. “The problem is”, he said, “that you can’t have your cake and eat it: you can’t have quantum reality [i.e. superposition] and recognise a body”. 36 While a figure can be discerned in the centre of the cloud, it is unclear whether the figure is dissolving and breaking apart or coming together as the one-and-a-half metre individual sections of steel that make up the large sculpture are arranged in an open fashion.

Figure 18. Antony Gormley Quantum Cloud 1999, steel sections, 3000 x 1600 x 1000cm. Photograph by Andy Roberts, http://distributedresearch.net/blog/

Quantum Cloud gives a sense of randomness (through the haphazard open placement of steel sections) and meaning (achieved through the discernment of a figure in the cloud). Like an experimenter making a quantum measurement, by gazing up at Quantum Cloud the viewer could be the measuring device; the agent acting upon the system and causing the wave/particle duality to ‘collapse’ into material reality. With Quantum Cloud, Gormley seems to have found a way

to express the baffling concept that something only becomes ‘real’ when measured or even merely observed by us.

To complete the picture and to assist in further discussion concerning the nature of superposition collapse and consciousness in artworks in this exegesis, it must be clarified that many physicists do not accept that an observer, and therefore the consciousness of the observer, is involved in collapse of quantum superposition. A summary of high-profile physicists’ opposition to observer- caused collapse appeared recently in an article in the Journal of Cosmology.37 Richard Feynman’s view was, “Nature does not know what you are looking at, and she behaves the way she is going to behave whether you bother to take down the data or not.” Nobel Prize winner and Caltech physicist, Murray Gellmann said, The universe presumably couldn't care less whether human beings evolved on some obscure planet to study its history; it goes on obeying the quantum mechanical laws of physics irrespective of observation by physicists.

And Anthony J. Leggett, physicist and Nobel Prize winner, said, “It may be somewhat dangerous to explain something one does not understand very well [the quantum measurement process] by invoking something [consciousness] one does not understand at all!”38

To conclude, in this chapter, I have discussed numerous artworks that successfully engage with the concept of quantum superposition and collapse and the role consciousness might play in collapse. These concepts challenge, in a significant and disturbing way, the idea that reality is knowable, mind- independent and objective. Pre-material quanta have a dual nature, but we can know nothing of this nature until an observation or measurement is made. The role that consciousness might play in collapsing superposition is highly controversial but is being seriously investigated by physicists and philosophers.39 I have argued that where artists do not grasp the extra-ordinary nature of such concepts, such as in the Quantum Dada exhibition, their artworks fail in their engagement and confuse the viewer. In the next chapter, I will continue this discussion in terms of artworks that engage with the quantum theory idea that superposition does not collapse.

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1 Julian Voss-Andreae, “Quantum Sculpture: Art Inspired by the Deeper Nature of Reality,” Leonardo, 44, no. 1 (2011): 17. 2 Jonathan Allday, Quantum Reality: Theory and Philosophy (Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2009), 5—6. 3 Albert Einstein, “On a Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion of Light,” trans. D. Ter Haar, in The Old Quantum Theory (Oxford: Pergamon Press, [1905] 1967), 91—107. 4 Jonathan Allday, Quantum Reality: Theory and Philosophy (Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2009), 8. 5 Buckminsterfullerene molecules (C60), also called ‘buckyballs’, contain sixty carbon atoms; Julian Voss-Andreae, “Quantum Sculpture,” 15—16. 6 Ibid., 17. 7 For instance, Julian Voss- Andreae has made a series of Buckyball sculptures in varying scale: “Quantum Sculptures: Buckyballs,” Julian Voss-Andreae’s official website, accessed 4 September 2013, http://julianvossandreae.com/works/quantum-sculptures-buckyballs/. 8 Johannes Kofler and Caslav Brukner, “Classical World Arising out of Quantum Physics under the Restrictions of Course-Grained Measurements,” Physical Review Letters, 99 no. 18 (2007): 180403-1; Olaf Nairz, Markus Arndt, and Anton Zeilinger, “Quantum interference experiments with large molecules,” American Journal of Physics 71, no.4 (April 2003): 319–29; Elizabeth Pain, “’Breakthrough of the Year’ Bridging the Quantum and the Classical Worlds,” Science, (17 December 2010), http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org.libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/career_magazi ne/previous_issues/articles/2010_12_17/caredit.a1000120 9 Kofler and Brukner, “Classical World,” 180403—1. 10 Daniel Crooks, “Studio Artbreak: Daniel Crooks,” Studio TV, accessed 4 September 2013, http://www.studiotv.com.au/arts-news/stvdio-artbreak-daniel- crooks/. 11 Daniel Crooks, “Artist Statement,” (2006) National Gallery of Australia online, http://www.nga.gov.au/fullscreen/06/crooks.pdf. 12 However note that in 2010, then PhD student Aaron O’Connell demonstrated quantum superposition in a human-made object observable with the naked eye. While in superposition, the object simultaneously vibrated a little and a lot; see Pain, “Breakthrough of the Year”. 13 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper Torchbook [1958] 1962), 54—55. 14 John Archibald Wheeler, “Law without Law,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 182–213; Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: An Alternative to Materialism,” Zygon, 41, no. 3 (2006): 599–615, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9744.2005.00762.x; Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: II: the Libet and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Causal Anomalies,” Erkenntnis, 65 (2006): 117–142, doi: 10.1007/s10670-006- 9017-y; John von Neumann, 1955, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955); Evan Harris Walker, The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge: Perseus, 2000); Eugene Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1967), 171–84; Amit Goswami,

“Physics Within Nondual Consciousness,” Philosophy East & West, 51 no. 4 (2001): 535–44. 15 Giancarlo Ghirardi, Alberto Rimini and Tullio Weber “Unified Dynamics for Microscopic and Macroscopic Systems,” Physical Review, D 34 (1986): 470— 91 16 Pain, “Breakthrough of the Year.” 17 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 339. 18 Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, (New York: Helix Books, 1995 [1963]), 117. 19 Ibid. 20 John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality (Black Swan: London, 1984), 2. 21 Werner Heisenberg, “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics,” Daedalus 87, no. 3 (1958): 99—100. 22 Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum- Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?,” Physical Review 47 (15 May 1935): 780. 23 Abraham Pais, “Einstein and Quantum Theory,” Review of Modern Physics, 51, no. 4 (1979): 907. 24 Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 54—55. 25 Andrew Jordan and Alexander Korotkov, “Uncollapsing the Wavefunction by undoing quantum measurements,” Contemporary Physics 51 (2010): 125, arXiv:0906.3468v1 26 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 340. 27 Eugene Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 168–81 28 Wigner, however, was not the first to postulate the possible, critical role of consciousness in collapsing quantum wavefunction. Earlier, founding fathers of quantum mechanics in the 1930s such as Neils Bohr, Walter Heisenberg and John von Neuman, all pro-collapse theorists, considered the role of consciousness. 29 John von Neumann proposed that the measuring apparatus must behave according to the laws of quantum mechanics and can be treated as part of the experimental set up and become entangled in the superposed state of the quanta being investigated: John von Neumann, “‘Measurement and Reversibility’ and ‘The Measuring Process’” (1932) in Quantum Theory and Measurement, 547–647 30 Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” 176. 31Michael Bise, “Quantum Dada,” Art Lies 66 (2010), http://www.artlies.org/article.php?id=1927&issue=66&s=0. 32 “Quantum Dada,” absolutearts.com, accessed 24 August 2013, http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2010/10/18/publish/2348910735.html. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid.

35 Antony Gormley, “Sculptures”, Antony Gormley’s official website, accessed 17 March 2010, http://www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/series 36 “Antony Gormley–Diary,” New York Times, 3 November 1999. 37 Michael Nauenberg, “Does Quantum Mechanics Require a Conscious Observer?,” Journal of Cosmology 14 (2011), accessed 27 March 2013, http://www.JournalofCosmology.com 38 Ibid. 39 For example, John von Neumann, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, trans. Robert T. Beyer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1932], 1955); Wheeler, “Law without Law,” 182—213; Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, “Orchestrated Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules: A Model for Consciousness,” Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, 40 (1996): 453—80.

Chapter 4 Conceptual foundation and engagement — the multiverse: a parallel proposition of non-collapse

In this chapter, I continue to analyse the conceptual basis of artworks that engage with quantum concepts; in particular, the non-collapse, many-worlds theory.

Conventional, objective reality implies the existence of a single reality. Although fundamental particles exist in a superposition of multiple states of possibilities, we (generally) only measure or observe single actualities, not superposed states. This is the measurement problem: how and by what agency does superposition collapse? Leading on from my discussion in the last chapter of artworks that interrogate quantum collapse, an alternate theory to solving the measurement problem is that superposition does not collapse. In this chapter, I will discuss works of art that engage with the idea of non-collapse, particularly the many-worlds theory of parallel universes. 1 This idea has startling consequences for our idea of reality. The many-worlds theory proposes many possible alternative that are continually branching, expanding in number at each point that an observation or measurement is made.

The two Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets Since reality, in the many-worlds scheme is relative to the observation of each observer,2 it seems appropriate that my own personal history, or that of those close to me, is the source of most of my artistic investigations into the many- worlds theory. Reflecting on the ‘what ifs’ of my past history, for my diptych, In another universe, my mother gave me the two Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets (2013) (figures 19, 20 and 21), I wondered what might have happened if, rather than hiding the two Mars bars and love note from a boy I adored in a kitchen cupboard that I discovered months later, my mother had given me these items at the time they were left on our front porch. I believe my life could have turned out much, much differently.

The ‘many-worlds’ idea, proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957, postulates that quantum superposition never collapses into a single state of material reality,

rather that the reality we perceive is merely one part of vast wavefunction of all possibilities that continue to exist in their own parts of a super-space of alternate physical realities. The act of observation severs the bonds of alternative realities. Reality, then, is relative to the observation of each observer; each observer experiences their own version of the world. In Everett’s scheme, only one physical system represents an observer.3 This means that the world appears to us in a discrete state, not in superposition, because we are living in our own subjective version of it.

How this subjective singular version arises and why we cannot perceive the alternate versions is left unexplained in Everett’s theory. However, Chalmers and others consider that if the many-worlds theory explains the measurement problem, consciousness is the key factor in interacting with superposed states and converting them into experienced reality. 4 Although it is not clear that Everett intended his theory to result in an infinitely branching universe, 5 his interpretation has been taken to mean that the universe is continually splitting 6 into a ‘multiverse’, upon every measurement or observation being made.

Figure 19. Lynden Stone In another universe, my mother gave me the two Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets 1993—2013, pastel on paper, award sash, oil on canvas, two Mars bars, pen on paper, glass jar and vase, plastic toy rocket, wooden cupboard, 96.5 x 180.5 x 13cm, installation view

Figure 20. Lynden Stone In another universe, my mother gave me the two Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets 1993—2013, pastel on paper, award sash, detail

Figure 21. Lynden Stone In another universe, my mother gave me the two Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets 1993—2013, oil on canvas, detail

If my mother had given me the Mars bars and love note, it is possible that I could have entered into a relationship with the boy, Robert Smeets, which would have kept me in Canada rather than opting to return to Australia a little later with my father. My installation, In another universe, my mother gave me the two Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets, presents the alternative where I have lived out a life in London, Ontario, as Lynden Smeets. It consists of two painted works housed within separate cupboards (figure 19). To see the works, the viewer must open the cupboard doors. The two doors represent alternate universes. In the cupboard on the right is an underwhelming still-life pastel painting (figure 20) that I completed in 1993. With this work, and in my life as Lynden Smeets, I win ‘Best Painting in Show’ at the Ontario Rodeo Association Western Fair District Show. The circular tray in the background, with its reflective surface, suggests a portal that is used in visual art (particularly film) to indicate a gateway into another world. In the cupboard on the left, is an oil painting that I completed in 2009 (figure 21). It is a backlit image of me in a doorway. Between the cupboards is an open shelf containing two Mars bars around which a note is wrapped. After making this work, my discovery that Robert Smeets passed away ten years ago in the timeline I have been experiencing filled me with sorrow.

Dribblejuice Another work depicting an alternative outcome from my past is based on an event that occurred when I was four years old. My older sister Dixie, who was nine at the time, tried to persuade me that drinking her dribble would transport me into the world of our dolls where they would appear real and talk to me. I remember how hard she tried to convince me to drink ‘Dribblejuice’ and how desperately I wanted to be in the dolls’ world. My installation Dribblejuice (2010—12) (figures 22, 23, 24 and 25) is premised on the many-worlds. It proposes that the alternate possibility, where I did drink my sister’s dribble, has manifested into a different reality. Even though parallel realities seem implausible to conventional reality, in Dribblejuice, I have stretched implausibility further. Not only has the alternate reality where I drank Dribblejuice manifested, but so has my sister’s promise that I would be transported into the scale of our dolls’ world.

Figure 22. Lynden Stone Dribblejuice 2010—12, oil on board, inkjet print on cotton, viewing mirror, LED sensor light, chair, dimensions variable, installation view. Photograph by Renata Buziak.

Figure 23. Lynden Stone Dribblejuice 2010—12, detail. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Figure 24. Lynden Stone Dribblejuice 2010—2012, installation view

Figure 25.

Lynden Stone Dribblejuice 2010—2012, installation view. Photograph by Renata Buziak.

Dribblejuice consists of a small, horizontally mounted oil painting (figure 23) hidden behind a patterned curtain. To see this painting the viewer must sit on a child’s play chair and look, one-eyed, through a tiny wall-mounted mirrored viewfinder (figure 24). On approaching the chair, a sensor light, installed behind the curtain, is illuminated. A tiny reflected image of the painting, hanging above, can be seen in the viewfinder. The painting is of Dixie and me surrounded by our life-sized dolls. The palette is in hot pinks, yellows and turquoise.

Sitting on the child’s chair to view the horizontally mounted, upside-down painting through the mirrored peep-hole has the effect of disturbing traditional viewing techniques and dislodging ideas about the ‘reality’ of observing artwork. Additionally, the act of peering closely into the peep-hole evokes an intimacy between viewer and viewed that would otherwise not be possible if the painting was mounted in a conventional way. In this way, the viewer is drawn into a unique spatial and temporal moment, like a closed physical system, discrete from the outside reality of the gallery. This method of viewing reflects the idea behind the many-worlds theory that reality, for each of us, is relative to our observation. Accordingly, Dribblejuice’s manifestation of one particular current in the ocean of all possibilities upsets ordinary, expected objective reality.

My father’s girlfriends In a third work concerning my own history, I take my father’s relationships with various women as the starting point for a series of ‘what if’ scenarios. For instance, what if my father had stayed with my mother; what would they look like as a couple later in life? After my parents split up, what if my father had stayed with Henrietta, who was partial to smoking marijuana; what might their wedding day look like? What if my father had stayed with Nora, a fat girlfriend who had severe alopecia and consequently no body hair? What if my father had stayed with Frances, the woman whom he did marry briefly, who seemed to me, through my fourteen-year-old eyes, to be sex-crazed. All these alternatives, and more, are painted on twenty-centimetre square tiles. These tiles are designed to interlock and move around in a frame as a large puzzle-tile work.

Figure 26. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, acrylic and oil on board, digital video (9:11 min) dimensions variable

Figure 27. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, video still, detail

Figure 28. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, detail

I filmed my eighty-six-year-old father interacting with the work and moving the tiles around, rearranging my alternate histories of his life. I used two cameras, running at the same time recording images from either side of his interaction with the work. In editing the video, I split the screen and ran both films together. On the left side image, however, I again split and mirrored the vision from a centre point. My father, and his body parts, move in and out from the centre of the mirrored image, disappearing and reappearing like movement through a central portal, possibly accessing multiple alternative universes. This idea of the portal, through which to access other worlds, has been exploited in science fiction but is generally not supported by the many-worlds theory. However, in 1997, German physicist Rainer Plaga speculated that parallel worlds are weakly linked, thereby permitting communication between branches of the multiverse.

He proposed “a procedure for “interworld” exchange of information and energy”.7

In performing this piece to be videoed, my father was mostly puzzled but was also appalled by the several pornographic images that I had painted to depict his life. I explained to him that the work concerned my relative viewpoint of my life had he chosen those alternate realities. It was also based on the perspective of views held by me as an adolescent, the time when these alternatives would have manifested. The final installation My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives (2012—13) (figures 26, 27 and 28) comprises the video projected in large format (figure 27) and the tiles, partially stacked in the frame with some also lying on the floor (figure 28).

Peter practiced everyday with his Everett box Even though physicists assert there is no known way to access different universes,8 I still imagine that one day we might find a way to interact with parallel worlds. For this purpose, I invented the ‘Everett box’ through the use of which we could discard body parts we do not like in this universe and choose other body parts (or characteristics or experiences or emotions) from versions of ourselves that exist in parallel universes. In my painting and mixed media installation, Peter practiced everyday with his Everett box (2011) (figure 29), Peter rehearses with his box to hone his swapping skills. This painting arose from the video resources I collected as part of the Mirror box project referred to in Chapters 2 and 3. In the painting, Peter is seen intensely interacting with a mirrored image of himself.

Figure 29. Lynden Stone Peter practiced every day with his Everett box 2011, oil on board, bicycle mirror, lenticular bookmark, 41.5 x 64cm. Photograph by Carl Warner.

In an endeavour to unsettle the viewer, the logic of the painting is disrupted by several elements. The vertical structure of the mirroring plane with which Peter is interacting severs spatial flow redirecting elements of the right side of the painting back onto themselves. On the left side, Peter’s almost lifeless hand contrasts to the tense concentration and effort reflected in the other hand and its reflection. The still hand on the left is just beginning to lose its form; dissolving into the lighter areas of paint above. Circular and geometric shapes (references to fundamental elements) seem to float in the air. The bicycle mirror (potentially mirroring and inserting the viewer into the scene) and the lenticular print bookmark glued to the top left corner and extending beyond the top of the painted surface that changes image as the viewer adjusts their physical position, shifts the spatial plane into three dimensions. All these elements contribute to a sense of disruption to both the visual and the conceptual content of the work. Precisely what Peter is doing is unclear but the reference to the ‘Everett box’ in the title gives some clues. His concentration seems to be linked

to what might be happening to his dissolving hand contained in the only box-like structure in the painting.

A possible shortcoming of this work is that it requires some explanation to convey its conceptual basis. To solve this, the didactic I display with Peter practiced everyday with his Everett box reads as follows: The peculiar nature of quantum physics has lead to the theory of multiple universes where all possibilities manifest into ever increasing numbers of parallel universes. Maybe, in the future, we might find a way to access parallel universes.

Schrödinger’s Cat, Hollingworth and other alternatives How can a viewer take the many-worlds idea seriously to enable doubt as to the existence of a continuing, relatively stable experience of a single, objective universe? The many-worlds theory is so fanciful that the artist has a difficult task. Some artworks ‘hit the mark’ conceptually and others do not. For instance, Australian painter Robert Hollingworth confuses Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment with the many-worlds theory of non-collapse as the conceptual basis in a body of his work. His exhibition, Schrödinger’s Cat and other cosmic alternatives (figures 72 and 73) was held at Blockprojects in Melbourne in 2013. Hollingsworth’s artist’s statement describes the basic scenario of Schrödinger’s thought experiment, and then asserts: “The idea is linked to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics where the cat is both alive and dead – but the ‘alive’ or ‘dead’ cats are in different branches of the universe that never interact.” He then asserts that his “paintings metaphorically represent equally valid alternative realities or ‘truths’ which may co-exist.” The paintings are abstract, Rorschach-like works, split in the middle, either horizontally or vertically with reflected images on both sides. Most are dark with flashes of intense colour. The titles of most works refer to cosmic phenomena.

Hollingworth misrepresents ontological theories of quantum mechanics by conceptually blending two separate ideas. Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is not linked to the many-worlds theory. The thought experiment critiques the idea of observation effecting collapse of a superposed state. Prior to observation, all possibilities are available. For Schrödinger, the experiment highlighted the absurdity of the cat being in the possible states of being dead

and alive at the same time and dependent on observation for resolution of those states. The many-worlds theory deals with a different issue: the proposition that superposition does not collapse and all possibilities manifest. The many-worlds interpretation could be applied to Schrödinger’s thought experiment (as it can be applied to any scenario) to indicate that the cat is dead and alive in different branched-off universes. Apart from this, they are not otherwise “linked”.

By casually blending two different issues in quantum theory, Hollingworth diminishes the even wider minefield of challenges to conventional reality that each issue separately presents. But I suspect Hollingworth has done this unwittingly without understanding the distinction between the thought experiment and the many-worlds theory. Like the Quantum Dada exhibition discussed in Chapter 3, his careless conflation of concepts diminishes the possibility that Hollingworth’s paintings can be an effective entrée for a viewer to understand quantum concepts. The paintings themselves look more like what we imagine as galaxies or cosmological explosions and the strong correspondence to these detract from an expression of “equally valid alternative realities or ‘truths’ which may co-exist”.

A more obvious expression of the idea of many-worlds is American artist Denise Stewart-Sanabria’s Quantum Confusion (2010) (figures 30 and 31). Her diorama depicts movement of life-sizes figures drawn in charcoal on plywood emerging and disappearing through a transparent Plexiglas membrane while other figures contemplate the scene. In her artist statement, Stewart-Sanbria identifies the figure on the far left as a physicist who is “the only alert presence…[while] the other participants complacently participate in something they haven’t figured out yet”.9 Like my works, Peter practiced every day with his Everett box and My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives, Stewart-Sanabria imagines that we might be able to move between universes through some sort of portal.

Figure 30. Denise Stewart-Sanabria Quantum Confusion 2010, charcoal on plywood, 244 x 549 x 244cm

Figure 31. Denise Stewart-Sanabria’s Quantum Confusion 2010, detail

French artist Laurent Grasso, winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2008, works across media to express the intersection of science and the paranormal. His paintings are relevant to my investigations as they indicate alternate

histories and alternate realities. Small-scaled and rendered in tertiary colours and flat application of paint, they are seemingly hundreds of years old, yet contain some surreal images among the otherwise realistically depicted figures and landscape. This juxtaposition of the supernatural into historical scenes interferes with our ideas of time and space. In his painting iheartmyart (2010) (figure 32), from the series Studies into the past, two figures on horseback, set in a rustic landscape and dressed as Spanish soldiers from Renaissance times, stare at a rock that is apparently floating in the sky. In another painting, Sphere (2010) (figure 33), a single figure on horseback looks up at a floating sphere from which numerous pyramids protrude. Both paintings are framed in wide, black-painted wood. The imagery, paint rendering, scale and framing devices all signal an historical painting from the Renaissance but the viewer’s perception is skewed by the anomaly of the floating rock. In the Western art-historical canon, images from the past simply do not depict aspects of physical reality in this way. These paintings stand as puzzling, yet apparently forensic, records of alternative histories.

IMAGE REMOVED TO COMPLY WITH COPYRIGHT

Figure 32. Laurent Grasso iheartmyart (from the Studies into the past series) 2010, oil on panel, 30 x 24cm

IMAGE REMOVED TO COMPLY WITH COPYRIGHT

Figure 33. Laurent Grasso Sphere (from the Studies into the past series) 2010, oil on panel, 32 x 25.5cm

A parallel alternative: Nixon & Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus I have also made works that stand as physical evidence of parallel worlds. I have mentioned already In another universe, my mother gave me the two Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets (figures 19, 20 and 21). In this work, the pastel painting with its winning champion sash is from my alternate life lived out as Lynden Smeets. Additionally, my installation, A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) (2013) (figures 34, 35 and 36) contain apparent artefacts from a parallel reality. This work addresses the assertion that, based on the many-worlds theory, our political and cultural worlds have evolved quite differently in other versions of the continually branching multiverse.

Figure 35. Lynden Stone A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) 2013, detail

Figure 36. Lynden Stone A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) 2013, detail

In the reality I have experienced to date, in 1959, Richard Nixon, then US Vice President, attended the American National Exhibition in Moscow. The Exhibition, sponsored by the US government, was a cultural exchange that showcased American technology and the material benefits of capitalism. A replica American house, built on the site, was filled with the latest in American white goods and gadgets that would “make life easier”—as Nixon said—for the ‘American housewife’. Nixon and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev toured the exhibit together, sampling Pepsi-Cola and looking at artefacts of American life. The pair was filmed using the latest ‘Ampex’ colour-television technology. During the course of their tour, they disparaged each other’s country’s technological advancements. Khrushchev was particularly critical of the model house. He thought the Americans were lying when they said it was a ‘typical home’ within reach of the average American. Nixon conceded that the Soviets might be ahead in rocket technology, but the Americans, he said, were ahead in other things, such as colour TV. The lively and spontaneous debates between these two leaders as they toured the exhibit became known as ‘The Kitchen Debate’.

Alternatively, in a parallel reality, The Kitchen Exchange is remembered as the first (and possibly only) time that a State cultural exchange was made on a molecular level. My installation, A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) celebrates this significant act of détente. Nixon and Khrushchev cordially and respectfully exchanged containers of their own flatus while in the kitchen of the model house built for the American Exposition in Moscow in 1959. In this parallel alternative, the barrel containing Nikita Khrushchev’s flatus, given to the American people, is held in the Smithsonian Institute. And a Soviet poster celebrating the exchange is held in the Moscow Museum.

Figure 37. Lynden Stone A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) 2013, detail

Figure 38. Lynden Stone A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) 2013, detail. Photograph by Carl Warner.

The work comprises three parts: an aged poster (figure 37) mimicking an archival Soviet political poster in a Mylar sleeve secured at the top with tape in Russian text indicating its source as the Moscow Museum; a small wooden and

steel painted barrel with an accession label from the Smithsonian (figure 38); and a digital video. Visual elements are repeated in all three parts. The poster depicts Khrushchev offering the barrel to Nixon. The translation of poster’s Russian text is: Molecules Exchanged! Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and United States Vice President Richard Nixon engage in a cultural molecular exchange. Moscow, July 1959.

The poster and barrel apparently appear courtesy of the Moscow Museum and the Smithsonian Institute, American History Museum. The video, displayed on a small media player and housed in a box, must be viewed, in an intimate way, through a studio camera viewfinder. The video is of Nixon and Khrushchev exchanging containers (the barrel and in Nixon’s case a glass jar), interspersed, in a stilted and fragmented way with original footage filmed by Ampex of Nixon and Khrushchev from the timeline of our own reality.

This work appeared in the exhibition Down the Rabbit Hole in August 2013 at the Queensland College of Art (QCA), Brisbane and at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, in September 2013. It appeared without the opportunity for a label or didactic statement to be affixed near the work. Without knowledge of the title or my intentions behind the work, many people approached me indicating surprise and delight that I was able to secure on loan the barrel containing Khrushchev’s flatus from the Smithsonian Institute. Many were also persuaded of the authenticity of the Soviet poster. I have succeeded in creating convincing objects that give the impression that a particular event occurred, at least in our own timeline. With the opportunity to read my statement about the work, arts writer Louise Martin-Chew accepts that my installation develops an imaginative scenario from an historical event in such a way as to prove the argument …that “Our reality is merely relative to our observation.”10

In this chapter, I have discussed numerous artworks that successfully demonstrate clear conceptual foundations that introduce to the viewer the many-worlds theory of multiple universes. Robert Hollingworth’s series of paintings, however, failed in this regard due to a lazy conflation of quantum concepts. In the next chapter, I discuss works of art that conceptually engage

with the final oddity of quantum mechanics that challenges conventional reality: quantum entanglement. ______

1 The other central non-collapse theory, the ‘hidden variables’ theory, posits that yet-to-be-discovered pilot waves guide and inform quantum particles; there is no ‘collapse’ of the wavefunction by an observer; rather, particles and waves are inseparable. See: Louis de Broglie “Wave Mechanics and the Atomic Structure of Matter and Radiation,” Journal de Physique et du Radium, 8 no. 5 (May 1927), 225—41; David Bohm, “A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of “Hidden” Variables I,” Physical Review 85 (1952): 166—79; David Bohm, “A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of “Hidden” Variables II,” Physical Review 85 (1952): 180—93. Although they diverge significantly in ontological ramifications, both the hidden variables and the many-worlds theories seek to address the measurement problem that is inherent in collapse theories. 2 Hugh Everett, “On the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics,” (PhD diss, Princeton University, 1957). 3 Ibid. 4 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 347 who cites the following: D. Albert and B. Loewer, “Interpreting the Many-Worlds Interpretation,” Synthesis 77 (1988): 195–213 and M. Lockwood, Mind Brain and the Quantum (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 5 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 347. 6 For example, see Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 382; John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality (London: Black Swan, 1984), 235 and 238; Raphael Bousso and Leonard Susskind, “The Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Cornell University Library (2011) arXiv:1105.3796v3. 7 Rainer Plaga, “Proposal for an experimental test of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics,” Foundations of Physics 27 (1997): 559— 77, arXiv:quant-ph/9510007. 8 However, Rainer Plaga proposes a method of exchanging information between parallel worlds: Plaga, “Proposal for an Experimental Test.” 9 Denise Stewart-Sanabria, Quantum Confusion art prize entry (2011), accessed 24 August, 2013, http://www.artprize.org/e-stewartsanabria/2011/quantum-confusion. 10 Louise Martin-Chew, “Down the Rabbit Hole and into Wonderland”, Down the Rabbit Hole: A Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and University of Southern Queensland Visual Art Research Project Exhibition Catalogue (Brisbane: Octivium Press, 2013), 65.

Chapter 5 Conceptual foundation and engagement - quantum entanglement

The last two chapters have discussed artworks dealing with quantum concepts that demonstrate either the artist’s clear, basic understanding of the concepts or the lack thereof. These works refer to the baffling quantum concepts that articulate that our world is in a state of pre-material superposition of possibilities, yet we experience it as material and in discrete singularity. Various quantum theories endeavour to explain why we experience the world this way. These theories include: the relationship of the observer to quantum collapse; and the many-worlds theory of non-collapse where parallel, infinitely branching universes might exist. However, there is another feature of quantum mechanics that defies conventional reality in an alarming way; quantum entanglement. According to Erwin Schrödinger, this trait of quantum mechanics “enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought”.1 In this chapter, I will discuss whether a clear understanding of the quantum concept is reflected in the selected works of art that engage with the idea of quantum entanglement.

Spooky actions at a distance Entangled pairs of photons are created as the result of the fission of a single higher-energy photon travelling through a beta-barium borate crystal. The pairs can be separated and sent speeding off in opposite directions, becoming separated by vast distance. A measurement on one part instantly affects the other, separated part. 2 Schrödinger explained quantum entanglement as follows: When two systems… enter into physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before.3

In Schrödinger’s terms, they have become “entangled”. Further, an observation performed on one of the separated but entangled systems can infer simultaneous knowledge of the other, separated part. 4 The essential feature of quantum entanglement is that it seems to happen faster than the speed of light. This does not seem possible since, according to classical Newtonian physics, it is not possible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light. However, in

the latest experiments demonstrating entanglement at a distance via instantaneous transfer of information, quanta have been separated by up to 143 kilometres.5

The fact that quantum entanglement works over arbitrary distances and by some inexplicable means of connectivity deeply troubled Einstein. He thought “physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance”.6 In his view, a complete physical theory of the world should correspond to an independent reality where a physical quality can be predicted with certainty without disturbing the system. There must be, he thought, some, as yet, undiscovered hidden variable that explains the apparent nonlocal information transfer between quantum particles.7 His certainty of this concept (known as “local realism”) formed the foundation of a thought experiment contained in a paper with two other collaborators (referred to as the EPR Paper8). Einstein and his collaborators considered the non-locality aspect of quantum entanglement to be illusion, and indicative that quantum theory is incomplete. The thought experiment was to test their theory that by adding additional but hidden variables, the apparent nonlocality of quantum entanglement would be explained.9

John Bell, an Irish physicist, thought the EPR Paper’s hypothesis worthy of consideration. In 1964, he designed a quantitative experiment, now known as ‘Bell’s Theorem’ as a way of testing for local, hidden variables that would explain entanglement.10 The theorem proposes that if local realism is a property of the world, then certain inequalities involving measurement correlations follow, that are violated by quantum mechanical predictions. The first experiments using Bell’s theorem were carried out in 1977,11 and, since then, many more that have violated Bell’s inequalities and therefore disproved local hidden variables as an explanation for the correlations between the particles.12 The means by which entangled but separated particles remain connected in some other than nonlocal way is presently, and possibly may remain, unknown. Currently, no testable theories exist to explain the “spooky actions at a distance” of quantum entanglement.

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Popular artistic renderings of the idea of entanglement often involve imagery of interweaving lines and objects in an obvious, largely unimaginative and often kitsch endeavour to express interconnectivity.13 These mostly fail to induce any expansive thinking by the viewer as they rely on correspondence to mundane concepts. For example, Victor Fota’s Quantum Entanglement (date unknown) (figure 39), relies on the cliché of twin blue atoms expressed as a miniature solar system, squiggly lines and distance expressed on an cosmological scale. Regina Valluzzi suggests her abstract work Entangled (2012) (figure 40) could be “quantum information, a polymer with some elasticity or perhaps your own shoelaces”.14 While quantum entanglement is an abstract concept, abstraction as an art form may not be appropriate to signify entanglement. Too many competing ideas are signified by abstraction. In the current Western canon, abstraction may, among other possibilities, be used by the artist to highlight the object-ness of the artwork, or as an expression of the artist’s making of the work or to suggest figuration, but in a reconfigured way. This painting, in its two- dimensional form, has limited effect to convey anything but the idea that it may represent the artist’s own wild expression of entanglement.

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Figure 39. Victor Fota Quantum Entanglement n.d., oil and metal leaf on canvas, 48 x 38cm

Figure 40. Regina Valluzzi Entangled 2012 , acrylic on canvas

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Koji Ryui’s sculptural installations that appeared in his exhibition Quantum Entanglement at Sarah Cottier Gallery in 2010 (figures 41 and 42), however, although suggesting the clichéd obviousness of entangled strings, have an openness and spatial expansion that does not constrict the viewer’s interpretation. Some figuration is suggested, and, grouped together, the sculptures suggest unseen extensions between each object that help to conceptualise interconnectivity. It is universal interconnectivity by some peculiar, imperceptible means that is the particular feature of quantum entanglement. Ryui is able to express this interconnectivity in a three- dimensional form, allowing the viewer to draw invisible relations between elements within individual works and between the works themselves.

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Figure 42. Koji Ryui Quantum Entanglement 2010, installation view, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. Image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Lucy Mckenna, Quantum Entanglement Irish artist Lucy McKenna’s installation of work in her Dublin exhibition Quantum Entanglement (2012), uses neither clichéd nor obvious imagery. This installation comprises several works that hang together under the banner of entanglement but individually explore additional ideas from the cosmological to the minute. McKenna was one of five people chosen from a worldwide call for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN15 laboratory near Geneva in 2012. Her Quantum Entanglement body of work was heavily influenced by her experience at CERN.16 Although the several separate works are about different elements of physics, for McKenna, entanglement epitomises the strangeness of quantum physics: “For me, quantum entanglement as a scientific occurrence represents that baffling magic, an inexplicable event that forces your mind to think in a non-linear way.”17 This leads to McKenna’s main ambition for the work: to investigate how we cope in the face of anomalies in our reality (like those suggested by entanglement and other strangeness of quantum mechanics) and how to make sense of these and give meaning to our existence.

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Mckenna implements her ambition in various forms, one being intimate wooden viewing boxes with peep holes. These works, Galaxy Dioramas (figure 43), use lenses, mirrors and lighting in a small space, yet they seemingly contain a three-dimensional galaxy. Displayed on shelves at chest height, they require intimate engagement; an adult must bend down to place their eye at the hole. A galaxy-through-a-peephole-contained-inside-a-small-box conceptually compresses a massive scale into a view where inter-connectivity, such as entanglement suggests, can be better understood. The images themselves (for example see figure 44) are from the Hubble telescope and, as provided by the Hubble Legacy Archives, are in a square format with parts missing. McKenna has overlapped these images to her advantage, suggesting, like quantum entanglement, both partition and connection at once.

Figure 43. Lucy McKenna Galaxy Dioramas 2012, wooden box, lens, mirror, plastic, slide image, LED, battery, installation view and detail. Photograph courtesy of Lucy McKenna.

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Figure 44. Lucy McKenna Galaxy Dioramas 2012, detail of interior view through peephole. Photograph courtesy of Lucy McKenna.

McKenna displays a beta-barium borate crystal, museum-like, in its own vitrine. This is the essential tool of the physicist to create entangled photons. The crystal itself sits in a small plastic box over which has been scrawled in marker by the supplier, Gooch and Housego Optics, the artist’s name and some technical measurements (figures 45 and 46). To prevent moisture reaching the crystal and subsequent deterioration, it remains sealed in its original vacuum packaging. McKenna treats this as a sacred object, the talisman that produces the magic of entanglement. Like the phenomena it produces, it remains enigmatic but is a prompt for further questioning by viewers.

Figure 45. Lucy McKenna Beta barium borate crystal 2012, beta barium borate crystal, plastic box. Photograph courtesy of Lucy McKenna.

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Figure 46. Lucy McKenna Beta barium borate crystal 2012, beta barium borate crystal, plastic box. Photograph courtesy of Lucy McKenna.

The projection, Quantizing Portents, is displayed in a large 1.5m format and although filmed in McKenna’s kitchen using mostly household objects, kitchen sounds including a gurgling sink, and a digital camera, nevertheless suggests fundamental sub-atomic randomness that evolves into organisation and complexity. I feel the kaleidoscope sequences in the film (figure 47) successfully evoke quantum processes. Molecule-like droplets pop in and out of existence, like the indeterminacy of quanta, or merge and divide in an evocation of an entangled state. The symmetry of the mirrored circular format evokes relational continuity and connectivity.

Figure 47. Lucy McKenna Quantizing Portents 2012, three video stills. Photograph courtesy of Lucy McKenna.

McKenna’s ideal is for an immersive and discrete space for all of her Quantum Entanglement works to hang together if she is to lead a viewer to doubt

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conventional reality. In this viewing space, she hopes a viewer will be coaxed into releasing conventional ideas.18

Jonathon Keats, Quantum Entanglements Unwrapping and putting to use his beta-barium borate crystal, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats creates a device that could, arguably, allow participants to experience quantum entanglement. His installation, Quantum Entanglements (2011) (Figures 48 and 49) splits the photons from sunlight and purportedly sprays entangled particles onto participants. Keats claims that human relationships will be fostered through the use of his device, offering his form of union and “entanglement” as an alternative to manmade laws of marriage.19 (As an aside, Lucy McKenna, who considers quantum entanglement to be a romantic notion, suggests engagement rings should not be diamonds but rather beta barium borate crystals.20 However, brief entanglement effects have been created in diamonds.21 ) Participants (who are expected to be couples or small groups who are happy to become “entangled”) are directed to stand at a designated place in the gallery. The work requires some explanation and directions to the participants. When exhibiting the work, Keats includes a statement including the following:

The technology is straightforward: Exposed to solar radiation, a nonlinear crystal entangles photons. Pairs of entangled photons are divided by prisms. The photoelectric effect translates their entangled state to the bodies of a couple who wish to be united, entangling them in a quantum wedding.

Apart from the sunlight they stand in, couples or individuals who interact with Keats’ device discern no particular physical effects and cannot be sure that they are being sprayed with entangled photons. However, interacting with Keats’ Quantum Entanglements enables the participants and viewers to appreciate the possibility that the world may be something more than knowable, material reality.

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Figure 48. Jonathon Keats Quantum Entanglements 2011, nonlinear beta- barium borate crystal, beam splitter, condensing lens, mirror, installation view. Photograph courtesy of Jonathon Keats.

Figure 49. Jonathon Keats Quantum Entanglements 2011, detail. Photograph courtesy of Jonathon Keats.

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The entanglement effect of the artwork (to bind couples together through subatomic particles even though they may be separated by distance), Keats says, is an act of faith, as any attempt to measure the entanglement will disentangle it.22 Keats premises this on the fact that the entangled quantum system sprayed onto the participants will not collapse and remain in a state of non-definite superposition until measured or observed. Physicist Evan Harris Walker made a stronger assertion about the lasting effects of quantum entanglement. He said, “Objects – all objects – that once have been in contact remain forever in intimate touch, forever entangled, no matter where they go, no matter how far in space they seem to be separated from each other.” 23 However, the persistence of quantum entanglement is not a view widely shared by the physics community. Apart from collapse of entanglement via observation or measurement, there is an argument within certain sectors of the physics community in favour of environmental collapse of the entangled state upon hitting the body of the participants.24

The discovery of quantum entanglement and its features of unexplained interconnectivity of information and nonlocality (the confirmation via Bell’s theorem that quantum mechanical predictions disprove the existence of local hidden variables conveying information) is not just of theoretical interest. Today, entangled quantum states are the basis for numerous important technological applications for our macroscopic reality from quantum computing, quantum encryption and quantum teleportation. Bell’s theorem, entanglement and nonlocality are regarded by physicists as among the most important developments of quantum theory.25 Keats’ Quantum Entanglements might be able to provide a new way of comprehending the ordinarily imperceptible quantum effect of superposition and entanglement. Quantum Entanglements introduces the notion of subatomic entanglement to an audience outside the scientific community and allows participants to contemplate this bizarre property of quantum entanglement through direct, physical engagement with the device. Yet for subatomic entangled pairs in a state of superposition this other reality does exist and has real technological application in the macroscopic world.

Clearly, quantum entanglement is a phenomenon that imposes a challenge on conventional reality. It suggests imperceptible inter-connections of an unknown

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kind on a universal scale. It has been extrapolated to account for a variety of phenomena and to assist in the explanation of particular metaphysical theories. Many physicists and scientists have linked quantum entanglement to consciousness and the basis for parapsychological (psi) phenomenon, such as the metaphysical expression of intention, telepathy, extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. 26 The idea that there might be, as yet, undiscovered, nonlocal hidden variables acting on entangled particles arguably provides some rationale to Bohm’s hidden-variables non-collapse theory of quantum mechanics under which all the information of the universe exists everywhere in a holographic and interrelated way. Bohm believes his theory is able to unite mind and matter and our experience of consciousness is a direct engagement with the unseen part of reality (which he calls this the “implicate order”) containing the hidden variables.27 While I have not yet made work directly about quantum entanglement, it does underscore how consciousness might operate in the ‘mind works projects’ that I will discuss in Chapter 9. In particular, proponents who argue that consciousness might operate in a way remote from the body and the immediate physical environment enlist the nonlocality feature of quantum entanglement as possible support for this proposition.28

Over the last three chapters, I have discussed how visual artists who conceptually engagement with quantum concepts provide means for a viewer to re-evaluate and, possibly, doubt a conventional view of reality that is composed of purely knowable, material objects. In the next chapter, I will begin a discussion of the specific devices deployed by artists to enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality.

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1 Erwin Schrödinger, “Discussion of Probability Relations between Separated Systems,” Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 31, no. 4 (October, 1935): 555, doi: 10.1017/S0305004100013554 2 Stuart Freedman and John Clauser, “Experimental Test of Local Hidden- Variable Theories,” Physical Review Letters 28, no. 14 (1972): 938—41; and Alain Aspect, Philippe Grangier and Gerard Roger, “Experimental Tests of Realistic Local Theories via Bell’s Theorem,” Physical Review Letters 47, no. 7 (1981): 460—63. 3 Schrödinger, “Discussion of Probability Relations Between Separated Systems,” 555.

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4 Ibid. 5 Xiao-Song Ma, Thomas Herbst, Thomas Scheidl, Daqing Wang, Sebastian Kropatschek, William Naylor, Bernhard Wittmann, Alexandra Mech, Johannes Kofler, Elena Anisimova, Vadim Makarov, Thomas Jennewein, Rupert Ursin and Anton Zeilinger, “Quantum Teleportation over 143 Kilometres Using Active Feed-Forward,” Nature 489, (13 September 2012): 269–73. 6 Letter from Einstein to Max Born, 3 March 1947 in The Born-Einstein Letters; Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born from 1916 to 1955, trans. Irene Born (London: MacMillan, 1971), 158. 7 Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?,” Physical Review 47 (May 15, 1935): 777–80. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 John Stuart Bell, “On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,” in Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 14–21. 11 John Clauser and Abner Shimony, "Bell's Theorem: Experimental Tests and Implications," Reports on Progress in Physics 41 (1978):1881–1927. 12 For a brief summary of tests, see Alain Aspect, “Bell’s Inequality Test: More Ideal than Ever”, Nature 398 (1999), 189–90. 13 See, for example, Vera Tour’s “Quantum Entanglement”, http://veratourart.tumblr.com/post/399344280/quantum-entanglement-acrylic- on-canvas-board; Robert Ford’s “Quantum Meditation Art”, http://www.myenergyaura.com; Ester Barend’s “Quantum Entanglement”, http://estherbarend.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/new-painting-quantum- entanglement.html; Victor Fota’s “Quantum Entanglement”, http://www.behance.net/gallery/Quantum-Entanglement-Doppler- Effect/9208285; Regina Valluzzi’s “Entangled”, http://nerdlypainter.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/entangled-sediments-painting- art/ 14 Regina Valluzzi “Entangled”, http://nerdlypainter.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/entangled-sediments-painting- art/. 15 ‘CERN’ is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. The acronym is from the French ‘Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire’; http://home.web.cern.ch/about 16 Lucy McKenna, email to the author, 27 August 2013. 17 Ibid. 18 Lucy McKenna, email to the author, 28 August 2013. 19 AC Institute, “Jonathon Keats: QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENTS,” (2011), accessed 7 May 2011, http://www.artcurrents.org 20 Lucy McKenna, email to author 28 August 2013. 21 Philip Ball, “Entangled Diamonds Vibrate Together,” Nature (1 December 2011) doi:10.1038/nature.2011.9532. 22 AC Institute, “Jonathon Keats: QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENTS”.

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23 Evan Harris Walker, The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge: Perseus, 2000), 132. 24 For instance, in discussion with the author on 15 May 2011, physicist and Associate Professor in the Centre for Quantum Dynamics at Griffith, Geoff Pryde (specialist in entangled quantum systems for computing and encryption) said that Quantum Entanglements would fail to effect any real quantum entanglement. His view is that while absorption of the photons by atoms in the bodies of couples that have been sprayed with entangled photon pairs may briefly entangle those atoms, the interaction of those atoms with the myriad other atoms in their bodies or in their environment will result in either a measurement collapsing the superposition and entanglement or a washing out of the information carried by the particles failing to result in any lasting “entanglement” of parts between two people. 25 David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture and the Quantum Revival (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 38. 26 Ibid., 65–95; see also, Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006); Robert Jahn, Brenda Dunne, R.G. Nelson, Y.H. Dobyns and G.J. Bradish, “Correlations of Random Binary Sequences with Pre-Stated Operator Intention: A Review of a 12-Year Program,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 11, no. 3 (1997): 345—67; Guy Vandegrift, “Bell’s Theorem and Psychic Phenomena,” The Philosophical Quarterly 45 (181) (1995): 471–76. 27 David Bohm, “A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter,” Philosophy Psychology 3, no. 2 (1990): 271–86; David Bohm, On Creativity, (London: Routledge, 1996), 128—30. 28 Bohm, “A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter”; Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, "On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness with Application to Anomalous Phenomena," Foundations of Physics 18, no. 6 (1986): 721–72; Walker, The Physics of Consciousness; Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, “A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research,” Proceedings of the IEEE, 64, no.3 (1976): 329–54; Imants Barušs, “Quantum Theories of Consciousness,” Baltic Journal of Psychology 7, no. 1 (2006): 43; Radin, Entangled Minds.

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Chapter 6 Answering the “how” – provocation of unconventional thinking

Introduction In aiming to answer this exegesis’ research question — how can visual art that engages with quantum concepts enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality? — the last three chapters have focused on artworks that identify quantum mechanics as their conceptual basis.1 In the next three chapters, I address the question specifically of how such artworks convey meaning and cognition and so enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality. I argue that the artist conveys meaning — and thereby facilitates cognition in the viewer — by using metaphorical devices, choosing particular materials and provoking unconventional thinking. In this chapter, I focus specifically on the last point. However, the provocation of unconventional thinking can take into account metaphoric use in artworks. This is particularly relevant in my discussion of Rudolf Arnheim’s methodology that argues for the importance of a specific isomorphic metaphor that is particularly useful in assessing artworks concerning quantum concepts. In Chapter 7, I will discuss other metaphorical use employed by artists and in Chapter 8, I will discuss artists’ choice of materials.

In this chapter, I will draw on Arnheim and Barbara Maria Stafford’s methodologies of how artworks can provoke cognition in the viewer. Their approaches to visual thinking (a term coined by Arnheim) address how it is possible, through cognition and analysis of visual dynamics, that particular works of art can induce non-linear thinking. Non-linear thinking is thought that moves beyond ordered, logical concepts; that one thing follows from another; that conclusions can be drawn from premises and statements of fact. Invoking non-linear thinking is helpful for an artist engaged in quantum concepts; non- linear thinking throws the viewer out of pre-conceived logical concepts and can be helpful to rupture ordinary expectations of conventional reality.

Visual thinking has been the subject of extensive enquiry by psychologists, art theoreticians and historians, philosophers, and even physicists. For artworks, visual thinking involves an artist’s consideration of conveying meaning through visual dynamics, including materials and metaphors. Understanding how the

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viewer derives meaning from an artwork requires considerations of perception, and how this relates, through psychology, neurobiology and, arguably, quantum processes, 2 to thinking, conception and even consciousness itself. Both Arnheim’s and Stafford’s approach to visual thinking is psychological; based on how perception and images interrelate with cognition.

Visual thinking — Rudolf Arnheim Arnheim, a perceptual Gestalt psychologist, art critic and ‘pro-imagist’ proposes a particular scheme of visual thinking that combines perception and cognition into one process seen as the same activity. He considers that, to understand the world, we obtain information through direct experience via our faculties of perception. Information is then processed by our minds through the same process to how it is received. In Arnheim’s scheme, perception generates the material for thought and in turn, thought and conception are visual activities. Thinking, he says, occurs in visual imagery.3 Arnheim employed his ideas of visual thinking to promote the importance of perception in cognition and the resulting cognitive value of visual art. He argued against the pre-eminence given to language in cognition.4

Arnheim suggests that certain images present a level of complexity that force the viewer to stop, assess and make judgements of meaning. Invoking this kind of behaviour in the viewer is helpful if an artist is to cause disruptions in expectations of conventional reality. In Arnheim’s analysis, perceptual thinking occurs in two ways that mirror the duality of human cognition functioning in different locations in the brain; intuition and intellectualisation.5 In the intuitive process of cognition, available only through direct perception, the totality of the image is taken in (size, shapes, colour, distances of shapes in relation to each other and the boundary of the work, etc.), and will be projected, by means of the eyes, upon the brain field of the visual cortex, where they all blend into an indivisible but highly organised structure….every component is dependent on every other. The structure of the whole controls the parts and vice versa.6 Thinking and problem-solving are undertaken via intuitive thinking. The viewer engages in an organisational process, structuring each element according to its place in the whole.

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Intuitive perception, says Arnheim, while conveying the experience of a structure, does not offer an intellectual analysis of an image. The intellectual method of cognition is more commonly employed in the sciences. It is equally as visual an operation within the mind of the viewer as the intuitive method but is not advanced though direct perception of the phenomena as a whole. Each element (shape, size, colour, etc.) is explored in isolation: The intellectual mode of cognition must sacrifice the full context of the image as a whole in order to obtain a self-contained description of each component.7

In Arnheim’s view, there is an interrelationship between both modes of thinking; however, the intellectual mode of thinking follows a one-directional linear succession of concepts,8 while the intuitive mode processes thought within a “continuous field”.9 Where all the elements of, as in my case, a work of art are perceived as a relational whole and in context, then, according to Arnheim, such kind of perception has the capacity to raise cognitive understanding “to higher levels of complexity and validity, but it exposes the observer at the same time to the infinity of possible connections”.10

The viewer must then, through analysing of the dynamics of the visual form, “distinguish pertinent relations from the impertinent ones” and be wary of the “effect things have on each other”11. On this basis, it is the intuitive process of taking in and cognising artworks as a whole that is preferred for this higher level of cognition.

Based on the Gestalt proposition, Arnheim considers that the universe, in both organic and inorganic systems, exhibit inherent ordering principles and imperatives. 12 As well, natural physical structures demonstrate that nature strives for states of simplicity. Humans and nature, says Arnheim, should not be seen at odds with each other. Similarly, then, the human mind will naturally engage in an ordering process and seek simplification in understanding complex images. Stimulus, says Arnheim, is organised by the viewer into the simplest precept.13 If Arnheim is correct in his claims, the artist is wise to exploit this fundamental ordering and simplification imperative. The artist can structure a work of art in such a way that complex imagery can expose the viewer,

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through the desire to gain order and simplicity, to multiple possibilities. Says Arnheim, Only when someone struggles to discover the order of a complicated composition [through this intuitive method of cognition], does he experience within himself something of the shaping process in search of the final image.14

Arnheim developed his perceptual model around the mid-twentieth century, in reference to static images.15 Several of my works involve additional non-static elements, such as looped video and interactive, rearrangeable tiles in A reminder of nows (2012) (figures 54 and 55) that I will discuss in detail in this chapter. These kinds of elements, which Arnheim did not anticipate as being so thoroughly embraced by artists in contemporary times, can only add to the complexity and multiplicity of permutations. If Arnheim is right, through a struggle of ordering and resolution by a viewer of complex (and sometimes non- static) imagery cognitive understanding and the facilitation of non-linear thinking may be increased. For my purposes, in this process, the viewer may be lured out of usual expectations of the world and into doubting conventional reality.

My previously discussed installation My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives (2012–13) (figures 50, 51 and 52; see also figures 26, 27 and 28) is an artwork that evokes, as Arnheim suggests, “the infinity of possibilities of connections”. A projected video on a large screen is installed beside a square frame that sits on the floor, propped upright against the wall. The frame has a capacity to hold fifteen interlocking square tiles but only nine tiles are in the frame, the rest are lying randomly on the floor (figures 28 and 51). The video, showing an elderly man (my father) moving the tiles around inside the frame, is split down the centre (figures 27 and 52). On the left, the image is mirrored causing the central image of my father’s body to disappear and reappear as if through a central portal. On the right side of the split screen, my father interacts with the tiles in the frame, moving them around and reordering their place within the frame. On each tile is a painted version of my father. Similar imagery appearing in several groups of tiles, indicates alternate scenarios within those groups. This work is intended to represent many possibilities.

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Figure 50. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, oil on board, digital video, 9:11 min, dimensions variable

Figure 51. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, detail

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Figure 52. Lynden Stone My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives 2012—13, detail

Image wise, My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives, is complex, with fifteen separately painted tiles that are both physically present and also in the video. However, seen as a cohesive whole, the possibilities of meaning are reduced. Through the viewer’s ordering process, the tiles present in the gallery and those in the video are seen as the same, the importance of the images on the physical tiles is reduced due to stacking, obscuring and placing the frame and some tiles on the floor. Accordingly, from many possibilities of meaning, the viewer’s attention becomes narrowed and is focussed on my father’s disappearance in and out of the frame, as if through a strange, supernatural portal and the rhythmical rearrangement of tiles occurring on screen. The viewer, in Arnheim’s scheme, struggles, using non-linear intuitive thinking to find order from complex imagery and multiple possibilities. These multiple possibilities (of different versions of history, of popping in and out of parallel universes) may open up ruptures in conventional reality in the mind of the viewer.

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Arnheim’s analysis privileges, for viewing artworks, the Gestalt approach of holistic, intuitive thinking through direct sensory experience. In this process, images are perceived as a whole and constituent parts are organised relative to each other in preference to the reductionist approach of analysing constituent parts. This preference highlights the divisions that have existed in the theories of cognitive science and also mirror the mechanical versus the non-mechanical view of reality that I outlined in Chapter 2. In particular, a dominant theory in cognitive science is that all thinking can be reduced to neurological brain processes. Arnheim leaves unanswered the specifics of how intuitive cognition arises in the brain. Rather, Arnheim analyses the structure of visual images in art to draw direct analogies to cognitive activity, using the physical art object as a kind of contemporaneous proof of mental cognition.

Visual thinking – Barbara Maria Stafford Giving similar importance to the role that perception of images plays in thinking and cognising, Stafford, however, has a more specific approach to visual thinking based on ‘neuroaesthetics’. This combines the study of perception with discoveries concerning the workings of the brain’s visual cortex. She believes that using neuroaesthetics to decipher visual art will not only shed light on the operations of the brain, but also might unlock the continuing mystery of the nature of consciousness, particularly qualia.16 (Qualia, as previously stated, is the mental state of consciousness that has a qualitative, phenomenal feeling.17) Specifically, Stafford looks at how particular visual combinations might be employed to “avoid the intellectual limitations of linearity” 18 in thinking. This recalls Arnheim’s lesser “intellectual” mode of processing, where the image is perceived in a reductive manner of constituent parts. For the artist creating images that might rupture expectations of reality, using particular combinations that avoid linear, logical thinking and provoke the sought-after, higher-cognitive, non-linear thinking is a helpful tool.

Stafford argues that the visual results of a combinatorial or a mosaic-blending methodology in artwork (such as collage, montage, hybrid and laced-together genres, and disparate, contrary and juxtaposed images) mimics the way high- order brain processes work in an interrelated way to make analogies, seek relationships and make connections.19 She says,

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Types of images that conspicuously do not blend their elements are especially effective in demonstrating the rules governing the brain’s connectivity, how it is able to activate many discrete areas possessing specific functions and juxtapose them into a larger coherent pattern.20

In Stafford’s opinion, observing pictures that conspicuously do not blend their images and do not accord with pre-formed understandings of the world (that correspond to laid down neuronal pathways) causes the viewer to “stumble” and question their current constructions of subjective and objective reality. But through this pause, Stafford suggests, the viewer becomes conscious of “how contingent, jumbled, and nonlapidary all material things, including ourselves, in fact are”.21

Stafford makes a strong distinction between, on one hand, mosaic-like “combinatorics” and on the other, a “fluid, effortless blending style [think Renoir etc.]”.22 Ordinarily, she says, on viewing images that are “effortless”, neuronal short cuts are taken through stored visual memory; that is, the brain recognises something and moves on without pause because of prior neuronal organisations. (I take these shortcuts to produce the “linear” thinking that Stafford refers to when she asserts that non-coalescing images “avoid the intellectual limitations of linearity”.23) However, when viewing collage, montage, hybrid and laced-together genres and disparate, contrary and juxtaposed images, because prior neuronal shortcuts are not in place, we are obliged to mentally labour “to combine many shifting and conflicting perceptions into a unified representation”.24 This is similar process to Arnheim’s suggestion that viewers will struggle with complex images in their desire for ordering and simplification.

There is an interesting resonance between my own artwork and Stafford’s analysis of how the perception of images relates to cognition that then might shed light on the mystery of consciousness. This happenstance makes applying Stafford’s analysis to my work all the more pertinent. Many of my artworks specifically draw attention to a gap between the observation and physical reality that could be filled by the viewer’s consciousness. I endeavour to focus the viewer on this gap through devices such as peep holes and viewing boxes, lenticular prints, and, in my ‘mind works’ projects providing actual events of

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quantum superposition with which, arguably, consciousness can interact directly to affect material output. Many of my artworks, through being conceptually grounded in quantum concepts and in providing “stumble points”, will provoke the kind of non-linear thinking concerning “contingency”, “jumble-ness” and “nonlapidary” aspects that Stafford has in mind. The world at its fundamental, constituent parts of quanta, is also contingent (on the orthodox interpretation, we know nothing of it until we observe or measure it), jumbled (quanta are random and inchoate) and nonlapidary (quanta do not possess material properties).

Many of my works exhibit, in varying degrees, combinatorial or blending methodologies. For instance, through a combination of puzzling imagery, the viewer conceptually stumbles over Peter practiced everyday with his Everett box (figure 29): a man engages with a reflection of himself; the viewer must make sense of three hands; the surface contains ethereal patches of imagery and geometric symbols; and realistic renderings are contrasted with areas where attention is drawn to the medium of paint. The confusion is enhanced through collaged elements: a bicycle mirror is screwed centrally to the surface and a lenticular bookmark with tassel is glued and juts out from the top left of the work. Stafford says collage is particularly good at mimicking high-order brain processes that cause this stumble, pause and consequent new relational understanding. She says, Because it is not preblended, braiding collage obliges us to see ourselves mentally labouring to combine many shifting and conflicting perceptions into a unified representation.25

Similarly, in Laurent Grasso’s series of works Studies into the past (figures 32 and 33), the stumble points are the juxtaposition between the apparent oldness of the objects, as conveyed through the imagery, paint application, colour palette and framing devices and the peculiar floating images.

In my A reminder of nows (figure 54), a work that I will discuss in detail later, a stumbling point is my juxtaposition of the video work with the painted stills on the tiles. The viewer has to asses the curious interrelationship between the two forms; one a moving image with audio, and the other a static painted image. (A similar stumbling point is also present in Kevin wondered if the moon was there

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when he wasn’t looking (2010—12) (figure 16), where the moving image of the moon is set against the static image of the bear.) Additionally, the painted portraits of the woman are set in contrary orientation to each other; some are in a normal orientation, and some sideways and upside down. Finally, the presentation of the work as a giant hand puzzle contradicts its convention as a work of fine art.

In My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives (2012 –13) (figures 26, 27 28, 50, 51 and 52) — like Kevin wondered if the moon was there when he wasn’t looking, and A reminder of nows — the juxtaposed moving image and static parts give the viewer pause to consider the relationship between these elements. In the video, all tiles are installed in the frame. This contrasts with the disassembled physical work. The images on the tiles do not immediately bear contextual or narrative relationship, given that the representation of my father in the images ranges over a thirty-year period and the he can hardly be recognised as the same man in each. Finally, the images range from the banal to the pornographic, and reconciling these disparate images is yet another stumbling point.

Isomorphic correspondence Stafford’s “stumble points” highlight her view of how the brain can engage in “high-order forms of envisioning [to] make an elusive personal awareness substantially real in an external realization”.26 Further, she asks us to consider the brain as a “variously textured unity” 27 through which the outer world is represented to ourselves. Bearing in mind the “high-level associative architecture” that is the neuronal network, she proposes that the “combined look and feel” of a perceived object is analogous to the associative architecture of neuronal activity.28 Stafford is alluding to a more forceful idea propounded by Arnheim and Gestalt psychology. Arnheim considers that an essential constituent of a viewer’s high level non-linear cognition is the necessity for an isomorphic metaphoric correspondence between the physical structure of images and the conceptual structure to which they refer. 29 Direct perception is, for Arnheim, the most persuasive source of knowledge. Accordingly, artwork “will have its full impact only if the perceptual pattern reflects the constellation of forces that underlies the theme of the picture”.30

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Arnheim describes what he means by isomorphic metaphoric correspondence between formal structural and conceptual structure through the example of Rembrandt’s Christ at Emmaus (1648) (figure 53).31 In Arnheim’s analysis, the compositional groupings of the figures symbolise the religious significance of the biblical story. Christ is centrally located between the two disciples. Background symmetrical architecture and the halo of light around Christ’s head heighten this triangulation indicating the traditional hierarchy of religious pictures. However, this pattern, placed to the left, allows a second triangular shape with the head of the servant boy at its apex. Rembrandt’s intention, Arnheim concludes, is to represent, compositionally, the humility of Christ that is reflected in the Protestant New Testament. Christ’s head deviates from the central axis and appears subservient to the second triangular shape, the apex of which is the humble servant boy. In Arnheim’s view, the basic compositional scheme carries the central subject matter: “It presents the underlying thought in a highly abstract geometry, without which the realistically told story might have remained a mere anecdote.”32

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Figure 53. Rembrandt van Rijn Christ at Emmaus 1648, oil on board, 65 x 68cm

If Arnheim’s model is correct — i.e., that works of art are able to evoke non- linear cognition at a high level in a viewer particularly where there is a metaphoric correspondence between their formal structure and the conceptual structure to which they refer — then it is helpful to my purposes. Such provocation of thinking may jolt the viewer out of conventional thinking and apprehend a rupture in expected reality. Accordingly, I propose to use his model to assess whether works of art dealing with quantum concepts have a structural correspondence to their concept.

My artwork A reminder of nows (2012) (figures 54 and 55) is an example of an isomorphic metaphoric correspondence between the structure of the image and, as Arnheim says, “the pertinent features of the situations for which the thinking shall be valid”;33 that is, the conceptual structure of the artwork. In A reminder of nows, eight interlocking tiles move through the participant’s interaction, within a square frame. On seven tiles is a different painted image of a young woman’s head. The eighth tile houses a small media player on which a

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video of the same woman is playing. She is repeatedly saying the word “now” in different scenarios. This work conceptually engages with the idea, revealed in both quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, that time is symmetrical and does not differentiate between past and future.34 It also draws on physicist Julian Barbour’s interpretation of time: that time and motion are illusory; a construction and interpretation of our brains to make sense of an apparently conterminous existence.35

Figure 54. Lynden Stone A reminder of nows 2012, oil on board, digital video (3:38 min), media player, 63 x 26 x 4cm

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Figure 55. Lynden Stone A reminder of nows 2012, installation view. Photograph by Carl Warner.

Barbour’s view is that we exist in a multiverse where all possibilities exist as points in space. If we could see the totality of the picture, he asserts, we would know that time is not linear. At each split second, he says, billions of molecules

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in the body are destroyed and created so that at each instant we are different people. 36 What we are experiencing, he says, is a series of discrete “instantaneous configurations of matter”37 that are eternal and never change and are each self contained snapshots of “nows”. Barbour’s idea is that time is not a linear arrow as we normally conceive of it; rather, it measures the difference in the universe between each separate configuration of matter, between separately occurring “nows”. This contrasts to how we ordinarily experience time as an entity always moving forward in linear direction. His idea also differs from our sense of material objects persisting through space and time. In A reminder of nows, the woman in the video constantly reminds us that we construct our linear arrow of time by linking together these discrete moments of “nows”.

The physical structure of A reminder of nows, on separate tiles, is isomorphic to the structure of Barbour’s separate time slices that, he says, exist as physical manifestations of “nows”. The rearrange-ability of the tiles corresponds to the proposition that time is not a linear arrow of time, but rather, possibilities that exist in points in space. The viewer interacts with the physical structure of the work in the same way that the Barbour’s physical time slices might be interacted with and accessed. In the formalism of physics, time can be accessed backwards and forwards.

Similarly, an isomorphic metaphoric correspondence exists in My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives (2012 –13) (figures 26, 27, 28, 50, 51 and 52), between the structure of the work and the conceptual structure to which it refers. Two distinct elements of the work suggest multiple alternatives. First, the video element shows all tiles installed in the frame together with the physical (albeit digital) presence of my father who disappears and re-emerges. The second element is the physical presence of the frame and disassembled tiles upon which are recorded alternate possibilities of my father’s life. This corresponds with the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics where, in the popular version of the theory (as opposed to Everett’s original formulation38), many alternate versions of physical realities constantly manifest.

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In The superposition of Neville’s brain, also known as Wigner’s Friend (2010 – 13) (figure 17 and 56) the peephole device, used to entice the viewer into acts of observation, bears isomorphic metaphoric correspondence to the observer’s role in superposition collapse. In Dribblejuice (2010 –12) (figures 22, 23, 24 and 25), the observation through the viewfinder is isomorphic to the relative perspective of the observer in experiencing a discrete reality in the many-worlds theory.

What is the quantum world isomorphic to? Using Arnheim’s scheme of employing visual imagery to assist with cognition of quantum concepts, as opposed to words and language, is desirable because

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Arnheim stresses the pre-eminence of cognition gained through visual imagery over language. As Werner Heisenberg said, the quantum world is next to impossible to describe using ordinary language, or any kind of “intuitive geometrical interpretation because the motion of electrons cannot be described in terms of the familiar concepts of space and time”. 39 Therefore images, including those created by physicists (such as Richard Feynman’s diagrams), to depict quantum concepts, are vital to help both physicists and non-physicists understand an unvisualisable world.

However, using Arnheim’s scheme to aid understanding of quantum concepts is also problematic because the relationship to perception and knowledge in quantum mechanics is utterly different than in conventional reality. Heisenberg identified the issue; in conventional reality, objects are tangible and the act of perception does not disturb the object. He says, However, for the smallest building blocks of matter every process of observation causes a major disturbance; it turns out that we can no longer talk of the behavior of the particle apart from the process of observation. In consequence, we are finally led to believe that the laws of nature which we formulate mathematically in quantum theory deal no longer with the particles themselves but with our knowledge of the elementary particles.40 So, there is simultaneously an inability to perceive the quantum world and, under the orthodox theory of quantum collapse, perception becomes an active agent in creating knowledge about the collapsed quantum state.

The inability to perceive the quantum world means that isomorphic correspondence between images and quantum concepts will only ever be on an abstract level and can never correspond, either representationally in the artwork or conceptually in the mind of the viewer, to a tangible world. This makes sense; the quantum world is not tangible or knowable. However, it presents the following problem: if a viewer is to make any sense of works of art relating to quantum concepts, what can these works correspond to, or in Arnheim’s terms, what can these concepts be isomorphic to? Physics itself provides some answers. The models that physicists and mathematicians themselves have developed, although incapable of representing immaterial quantum states and relationships, provide some solidification of conceptual abstract ideas. Barbour’s schematic model of “Platonia” is, for him, a demonstration of eternity

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as it represents all possible instants of time (figure 57).41 The formal structure of A reminder of nows (figures 54 and 55) with its separate, rearrangeable panels is an isomorphic metaphor of Barbour’s ideas and his physical model of Platonia.

IMAGE REMOVED TO COMPLY WITH COPYRIGHT

Australian artist Sam Leach has based a series of paintings on Barbour’s ideas.42 In Leach’s Platonia series, he uses geometric figuration as both an abstract formal element in the painting and also to suggest natural forms either existing as, or morphing into, mathematical representations (figures 58, 59 and 60). Perhaps Leach is suggesting both the physical reality we perceive as well as other multiple possibilities represented formalistically, that lie outside our perception. However, Leach’s images carry the inescapable comparison to cubism. A viewer could conclude these images are about simplification, abstraction and a multiple, but classical, perspective. The crocodile, on an apparently reflective surface, stands on an image of itself but the image is a geometric cardboard-like figuration. This painting seems to be addressing the crocodile as a subject for display or as a commercial product, rather than notions of time. The bottom image could be a specially designed crocodile plinth or a box for packaging up a taxidermied crocodile.

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Figure 59. Sam Leach Birds Boundary (from the Platonia series) 2010, oil and resin on linen on wood, 26 cm x 36cm. Image source: COMODAA Art galleries http://www.theloop.com.au/comodaa/project/16411

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Figure 60. Sam Leach Crocodile Reflection (from the Platonia series) 2010, oil and resin on linen, 45 cm x 30 cm. Image source: COMODAA Art galleries http://www.theloop.com.au/comodaa/project/16411

Curator and writer Pavel Pys accepts the correspondence of Leach’s paintings with Barbour’s concept of time. Pys says Barbour proposes an hypothesis of “socially recognised ‘instants of time’ – standstill constellations of change and motion” and that Leach’s “resin-coated ‘snapshots’ sympathise with Barbour’s conceptualisation of history not as a relentless flow, but rather a series of socially constructed ‘nows’ or ‘capsules’”.43 While Barbour does conceptualise time as “nows” or time capsules, Pys misstates Barbour’s ideas of time that supposedly underpin his work and correspond with Leach’s painting. Barbour argues for a re-conception of time away from a dynamical concept to one that is impotent and simply records the changes between the instants of matter configurations. In Barbour’s conception, these “nows” or time capsules exist. Social construction of time (which Barbour argues against) is about linking these “nows” together to give greater power to the concept of time. Unlike A reminder of nows (figure 54 and 55), the relationship to Barbour’s idea of time in

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Leach’s paintings is not clear. Using Arnheim’s isomorphic analysis, structural correspondence is lacking between the elements of the painting and Barbour’s concept of time failing to promote cognition of the concept.

Other physical and conceptual models in physics exist, which an artist can exploit for metaphoric cognitive value. For instance, the thought experiment “Schrödinger’s cat” (discussed in Chapter 3) was proposed to indicate the paradoxical nature of the wave/particle duality of quantum superposition. In my painting, Erwin’s puss (2011) (figure 14), the large cat is constrained by the rectangular box suggested by the canvas and by perspectival lines. His body and half his head is like a green x-ray skeleton. A radioactive atom is represented as a comet travels through the image. Wave-like green stripes mimic the wavefunction of both possible states. The formal visual elements of the painting correspond to the elements imagined in the experimental setup. Closer still to Arnheim’s concept of isomorphic metaphoric correspondence between an artwork’s structure and structure of concept, the confines of the canvas itself act as the limits of the box and the experiment.

Similarly, in The superposition of Neville’s brain, also known as Wigner’s friend (figure 17), the perceptual structure reflects the theme of the picture’s concept of Wigner’s thought experiment (described in Chapter 3) and increasing superposed systems. This is established by the figure looking through the microscope, the wooden addition to the top of the canvas, the skull cap, wires and peep box installed to the left of the canvas. Additionally, the interactive opportunity for the viewer to join the system (according to von Neumann’s mathematical formalism) or collapse the system metaphorically through observation into the peep box recalls Wigner’s proposition for the special place of consciousness in collapse.

While models in the physical world of quantum concepts can be helpful tools to assist in understanding, they are necessarily treated with caution as they can give a mistaken view of the correspondence of the quantum realm to the physical world we inhabit. In the beginning of Chapter 3, I described how the double-slit experiment was devised to solve the longstanding debate in classical physics as to whether light is a particle or a wave. The experiment showed that

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light, and other quantum particles, could be recorded or observed as either particles or waves, depending on the nature of the experiment. In the first part of the twentieth century, physicists and mathematicians worked on theories to describe the quantum domain. At the same time, the founding fathers were concerned with the lack of correspondence of quantum concepts to the physical world. In classical, pre-quantum physics, scientists had no problems in describing phenomena that takes place in our own space-time framework. Even if phenomena is unobservable, classical physics employs the same, analogous method of description used for observable phenomena. Quantum mechanics presents a problem in that it is non-visualisable. Physicists have disagreed on the importance of visualisability in understanding quantum concepts. Schrödinger thought visualisation to be vitally important in understanding, while others, such as Werner Heisenberg and prominent physicist Wolfgang Pauli, disagreed.44

In 1926, Schrödinger published equations that described atomic structure in terms of waves. The central features of quantum mechanics asserted the loss of individuality of atomic particles and the breakdown of the classical idea of intra-atomic motion. Therefore, according to Schrödinger, it was necessary to reject the particle/corpuscular view of quanta.45 He thought that quanta could not be particles: waves, however, could be treated as individuals and “easily marked, by their shape or modulation”. 46 He considered the waves that determine the probability of where to find a quantum particle on collapse of superposition were in some sense “real”. He said, Something that influences the physical behaviour of something else must not in any respect be called less real than the something if influences – whatever meaning we may give to the dangerous epithet “real”.47

John Gribbin in his book, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat says that, while Schrödinger’s own vision of physically real waves circling around the nuclei of an atom assisted him in formulating his equation, wave mechanics gives an illusion of something familiar and comfortable. It is that cozy illusion that has persisted to the present day and that has disguised the fact that the atomic world is totally different from the everyday world.48

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Taking advantage of this persistence of the wave as a conceptual model for the wavefunction of quantum superposition, this image was employed by Voss- Andreae in his Quantum Man (2007) (figure 6), and by me in Erwin’s puss (2011) (figure 14) and Kevin’s favourite thing was collapsing the wavefunction (2011–12) (figure 61).

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Physicists and mathematicians have not always used visualisable physical models or mental imagery to conceptualise quantum mechanics. For instance, science historian Arthur Miller noted that Heisenberg achieved his formulation of quantum mechanics in mathematical language “without a mental image of the atom because by 1925 all attempts to impose imagery on atomic theory had failed”. 49 Of course, these symbols reduce to graphic form (for instance, Feynman’s “intuitive” diagrams of the interaction of quanta50 figure 62), and can nevertheless be appropriated by artists as the basis of imagery. These symbols, having their own ontology within the formalism of physics and lacking correspondence in physical reality, however, act literally and not metaphorically. Without people’s knowledge of their meaning in physics, they are incapable of conveying a broader meaning. As such, sculptures, such as Maria Raff’s Feynman’s Fancy series (figures 63 and 64) fail to convey a challenge to or enable to viewer to doubt conventional reality. It seems that Schrödinger was correct about visualisability and understanding; at least from the point of view of non-scientists understanding quantum concepts.

Figure 62. Richard Feynman “Intuitive” diagrams of the interaction of quanta, n.d. Image source: http://inspirehep.net/record/1082448/files/fig4.png

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Figure 63. Maria Raff Feynman’s Fancy series n.d., stainless steel. Image source: http://www.marciaraffstudio.com/Feynmans.html

Figure 64. Maria Raff Feynman’s Fancy series n.d., stainless steel. Image source: http://www.marciaraffstudio.com/Feynmans.html

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Thus far, I have been discussing the fact that any isomorphic metaphoric relationship between artworks and quantum concepts for the purpose of cognition can only be abstract or will bear relationship to the imperfect physical and conceptual models generated in physics to conceptualise quantum concepts. I now turn to a second interesting consequence that results from a quantum world outside our perception, and one that may be revealed only through observation. This is the resulting coincidence between, on the one hand, Arnheim’s view that perception and cognition are one in the same activity, and on the other, the active agency of perception (consciousness) in the possibility of creating material reality. Clive Dilnot (former critic and theorist at Carpenter College for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, a position formerly held by Rudolf Arnheim) draws a similar conclusion to Arnheim that the relationship between perception and cognition, if applied to works of art, “involve the metaphorical apprehension of pictorial structure as cognitive structure”.51 Thus, artworks, such as my ‘mind works’ projects operate first as devices to allow mind interaction to collapse quantum superposition to effect a knowable physical result. So structured, as a metaphor they act isomorphically to the abstract concept of the mind’s possible relationship to quantum collapse. But they also act isomorphically as a metaphor to Arnheim’s concept of visual thinking itself; that perception is intertwined with knowledge. I will develop this idea further in Chapter 9 when I discuss the highly controversial idea that consciousness creates physical reality.

Using Arnheim’s and Stafford’s proposed models is helpful in addressing the question of how can artworks that engage with quantum concepts can enable a viewer to doubt material reality. Even though their approaches vary, both deal with the issue of how artwork might be able to provoke a kind of non-linear, unconventional thinking and resulting cognition in the viewer. If Arnheim is correct, the artist should consider complex combinations that nevertheless have ordering possibilities as well as works that reflect isomorphic metaphoric correspondence between formal structure of the work and the structure of conceptual underpinnings. If Stafford is correct, an artist’s combinatorial method of blending non-coalescent images can cause a viewer to avoid limitations of linear thinking by stumbling, pausing and questioning their

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construction of the material world. In the next chapter, I will discuss how the artist’s considered use of materiality is another tool they can use. ______

1 The exception is Daniel Crooks’ Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) (2010). Crooks does not specifically identify the work as addressing quantum concepts. 2 In Chapter 7 I will outline Thomas Frentz’s argument that cognition of metaphors might involve quantum processes in the brain. 3 Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkley: University of California Press, 1969); Rudolf Arnheim, “A Plea for Visual Thinking,” Critical Inquiry 6 no. 3 (1980): 489–97. 4 Arnheim said, “Language does not offer in and by itself and arena in which thinking can take place.” Arnheim, “A Plea for Visual Thinking,” 496. 5 Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 233; Arnheim, “A Plea for Visual Thinking,” 496. 6 Arnheim, “A Plea for Visual Thinking,” 494. 7 Ibid., 495. 8 Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 246. 9 Ibid., 234. 10 Ibid., 62. 11 Ibid. 12 Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 6—7. 13 Ibid., 48. 14 Arnheim, “A Plea for Visual Thinking”. 495. 15 It seems peculiar now, but Arnheim was suspicious of the perceptual value of film and the photograph. He said that the comprehension of “photographic pictures” (here he includes film) cannot be taken for granted: Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 309. 16 Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1999),138. 17 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4. 18 Stafford, Visual Analogy :Consciousness as the Art of Connecting, 144. 19 Ibid., 138 20 Ibid., 144. 21 Ibid., 117. 22 Barbara Maria Stafford, email to the author, 12 September 2013. 23 Stafford, Visual Analogy,144. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 138. 27 Ibid., 141. 28 Ibid. 29 Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 227. 30 Ibid., 262. 31 Ibid., 268—70. 32 Ibid., 270. 33 Ibid., 227.

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34 The ability to access time backwards at the quantum level has been demonstrated by the “delayed choice” experiment. See for example: John Archibald Wheeler, “The ‘Past’ and the ‘Delayed-Choice’ Double-Slit Experiment,” Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory, ed. A. R. Marlow (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 9–48; Thomas Hellmut, H. Walther, A. G. Zajonc, and W. Schleich, “Delayed-choice experiments in quantum interference,” Physical Review A35, no. 6 (March 1987): 2532—40; B. J. Lawson-Daku, R. Asimov, O. Gorceix, Ch. Miniatura, J. Robert, and J. Baudon, “Delayed Choices in Atom Stern-Gerlach Interferometry,” Physical Review A54, no. 6 (1996): 5042-5047; Y.-H. Kim, R. Yu, S.P. Kulik, Y. Shih, and M.O. Scully, “Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser,” Physical Review Letters 84, no.1 (2000); Anton Zeilinger, G. Weihs, T. Jennewein, M. Aspelmeyer, “Happy Centenary, Photon,” Nature 433 (2005): 230; V. Jacques, E. Wu, F. Grosshans, F. Treussart, P. Grangier, Alain Aspect, and J. F. Roch, “Experimental Realization of Wheeler's Delayed Choice Experiment,” Science 315 (2007): 966 cited in “A Quantum Delayed-Choice Experiment,” Science 2, 338 no. 6107 (November 2012): 634—37. 35 Julian Barbour, The End of Time (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999); Barbour, “Bekijk de Noorderlicht-aflevering 'Killing Time',” YouTube video, 23:09, December 1999 and first shown on Dutch television early in 2000, posted by “Norderlicht”, 7 April 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKsNraFxPwk; “Julian Barbour on Does Time Exist,” YouTube video, 54:16, 2012, Posted by “TVOBigIdeas”, 7 December, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?V=i5rexakleou. 36 “Bekijk de Noorderlicht-aflevering 'Killing Time'.” 37 Barbour, The End of Time, 27. 38 In Everett’s scheme, only one physical system represents an observer: Hugh Everett, “On the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” (PhD diss. Princeton University, 1957). 39 Heisenberg said this in 1926; cited in Arthur Miller, Imagery in Scientific Thought: Creating 20th Century Physics (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1986), 142. 40 Werner Heisenberg, “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics,” Daedalus 87, no. 3 (1958): 99–100. 41 “Bekijk de Noorderlicht-aflevering 'Killing Time'.” 42 Pavel Pys, “Sam Leach’s Platonia,” Art Monthly, 237 (March 2011): 38–39. 43 Pys, “Sam Leach’s Platonia,” 38, my emphasis. 44 Henk W de Regt, “Erwin Schrödinger, Anschaulichkeit, and Quantum Theory,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 28, no. 4 (1997): 463. 45 Mara Beller, “’Against the Stream’ – Schrödinger’s Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 28, no.3 (1997): 423. 46 Schrödinger cited in Beller, ibid., 424. 47 Ibid. 48 John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat (London: Back Swan, 1997), 117.

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49 Miller, Imagery in Scientific Thought, 221. 50 Ibid., 170. 51 Clive Dilnot, “Why Hamlet Appears in a Photograph by Margaret Bourke- White” in Rudolf Arnheim; Revealing Vision, ed. Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 57.

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Chapter 7 Answering the “how” – metaphors for the unvisualisable

In this chapter I continue my argument that the artist conveys meaning and, in works engaging with quantum concepts, facilitating doubt of conventional reality through the considered use of various tools.

As I indicated in the previous chapter, for the artist engaged in visual representations of quantum concepts, using metaphors can be problematic because of the lack of quantum concepts’ correspondence to the physical world. The quantum world is unknowable and unvisualisable. Accordingly, the way we understand quantum concepts will be in abstract or metaphorical terms that either relate to visual imagery including symbols, or to linguistics. The theoretical discourse on the authority and limits of the metaphor identifies two main lines of division: on one hand, that the metaphor is based on objective empiricism and on the other, that it is based on an intellectualist model that has been further developed into an experiential model. I will argue that the empiricist theory of the metaphor is unhelpful for the artist particularly so because it is contrary to the precepts of quantum mechanics. The intellectualist and experientialist models, however, support a theory that a metaphor is capable of inciting new knowledge both for the creator and the viewer that is helpful for the artist engaging in quantum concepts. I argue Thomas Frentz’s (Professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas) psychological model of creation and interpretation of the metaphor may be particularly appropriate in the circumstances. His model engages David Bohm’s quantum theory of the implicate and explicate orders in these creative and interpretative processes.

The metaphor A metaphor as Aristotle said, gives something a name that belongs to something else.1 However, Aristotle warned that they “must be fitting, which means they must fairly correspond with the thing, and yet not obviously so related.” 2 Metaphors are critical to aid new understanding. Karol Berger, Professor of Fine Arts at Stanford University, asserts “If we want to interpret things, metaphors and metonymies are all we have got.”3 The challenge for the

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artist representing quantum concepts is to find something to equate immaterial quanta to in circumstances where there is no correspondence between such concepts and the physical world.

Metaphor theorists, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, argue that metaphors are central to our conceptual system of how we perceive, think and act; as such, metaphors are fundamental to defining reality.4 They support their claims though demonstrating how language carries metaphorical concepts, linking a thing to a whole structure of another (for example, argument as war, time as money, or time as a moving entity). They use a language-based approach to prove their claims, because, they argue, language is a system of communication based on the same conceptual system used for thinking and acting. Visual artists, however, mostly use metaphors through imagery (although text can be present in the image itself, in the title and in supporting didactical statements). Even though it is the image-based metaphor in which I am interested, discourse on language-based metaphors, as will be referred to in this chapter, is still relevant, since I posit that both language and visual imagery are sources of and feed into thinking and cognition, which is the ultimate seat of metaphorical interpretation.5

Lakoff and Johnson identify metaphors as “conventional”, where they associate something to another within the ordinary structure of our conceptual system. Based on this definition, conventional metaphors will be of limited use to the artist in attempting to challenge the conceptual system of conventional reality. In order for metaphors to do their job in artworks dealing with quantum concepts, they must be able to associate something to concepts that that are outside the conceptual structure based on conventional reality. Metaphors’ actual ability to do this has been the subject of intense philosophical debate.

The empiricist view Johnson and Glenn Erickson succinctly and clearly define the ambit of the discourse on the authority and limitation of the metaphor in terms of the empiricist versus the intellectualist view. 6 The empiricists maintain that knowledge depends on the objective existence of material things that have correspondence to fixed and precise terms and meanings in language. As I

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discussed in Chapter 2, empiricism holds that the only knowledge we can have is gained solely through our experience of the physical world.7 Johnson and Erickson say that for empiricists, “Objects, it is claimed, have a determinative structure and stand in determinative relation to one another prior to the subject’s attempt to speak truly of them.” 8 Therefore, to have any ability to convey meaning, a metaphor must have strict literal correspondence to objects and the relations between objects. Thus, the empiricist understanding of the metaphor that requires structural relationship between physical objects and the metaphor is wholly unsuited to the expression of quantum concepts, which have no correspondence to objective, material reality.

Based on the empiricist explanation of the metaphor, a work such as Voss- Andreae’s Quantum Man (figure 6) is incapable of metaphorically conveying an idea of pre-material quanta. Similarly, my work, My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives (figures 26, 27, 28, 50, 51 and 52) cannot suggest that alternative versions of my father’s life are being played out in different universes, as these concepts have no empirical basis. In this sense, the works fail in their metaphorical and cognitive content, and the artist fails, through these techniques, of enabling the viewer to doubt conventional reality.

The intellectualist view The alternative, intellectualist position that Johnson and Erickson outline is that the metaphor has a direct role in the possibility of conveying new knowledge. This is based on the view that objects are determined relative to and fashioned by the activity of the subject. However, this is not a purely solipsistic view and there is a more fundamental concept behind this. In the intellectualist view, objects are relative not to particular subjects, who can thus be in error, but rather to generalized subjective viewpoints, which are the intersubjective ground of objectivity.9 According to this view, there are no objects that are independent of group conceptualisation. Conceptual systems, in the intellectualist view, have the capacity to change because of the infinite ways the subject may conceptualise experience. In this event, metaphors are indispensible and are capable of replacing the dominant conceptual paradigm with new or altered concepts. This idea of group formations of dominant conceptual paradigms that are nevertheless subject to

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change recalls my discussion in Chapter 2 of Thomas Kuhn’s radical idea that strikes at the objectivity of material things and the relationship of thought to matter (that is, when paradigms of thinking change, it is possible that the physical world changes too 10 ). It also evokes both a Jungian notion of a collective unconscious that I will discuss later in this chapter as a way of explaining the psychological process behind the creation and interpretation of a metaphor, and also, Rupert Sheldrake’s inter-subjective account of morphic fields of resonance that have the capacity to hold physical and conceptual systems together. I discuss morphic fields in terms of the relationship between consciousness and matter in the Appendix. Critically, for the intellectualist, metaphors have a creative capacity in “bringing together what was not yet associated” or, of “inducing alterations within a conceptual system or even a shift to a new system”.11

Immediately, it can be seen that the intellectualist account of the metaphor has relevance for the artist’s endeavours to convey new concepts, including quantum reality. It also corresponds to the relationship between the observer and the physical outcome of an experiment drawn in quantum theory, as I discussed in Chapter 3. Viewed through the intellectualist account of the metaphor, Voss-Andreae’s Quantum Man (figure 6) can suggest, through its repeated, spread-out slivers of metal, the idea of the wavefunction (itself based on the language of physics) of quantum superposition. Further, the separate tiles rearranged by the agency of my father in My father’s girlfriends, parallel alternatives (figures 26, 27, 28, 50, 51 and 52) can suggest the alternative versions of his life that branch into multiverses at every decision he makes.

Meditations on Klein bottles In Meditations on Klein bottles series (2013) (figures 65, 66, 67 and 68), The dynamic relationship between observation and creation # 1 (Space Invaders) (2013) (figure 69) and The dynamic relationship between observation and creation # 2 (QIX) (2013) (figure 70), I use the Klein bottle12 as a metaphor for the mutually enfolded relationship that quantum theory suggests between us, as observers and objects. A metaphor of this kind was suggested by Steven

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Rosen, 13 writer, philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at City University New York. Rosen adopted communication theorist Paul Ryan’s graphic linear schemata for the Klein bottle (figure 7114). This scheme suggests that the Klein bottle in three-dimensional space contains three parts: the uncontained area of the neck of the torus when it emerges, cylindrical fashion, to double back on itself (analogous, Rosen says, to us as the subject or observer); the contained area surrounded by the torus (analogous to the object observed); and the internal area inside the torus (analogous to space). In three dimensions, the Klein bottle pierces itself to demonstrate its continuous, non- orientational surface. Rosen says that by being represented in three- dimensional space, the Klein bottle is mis-described. Rather, it is a creature of four spatial dimensions where it is both open and closed and continuously one- sided without the need for self-penetration.

Figure 65. Lynden Stone Klein bottle meditation – pencil #1 (red) (from the Meditations on Klein bottles series) 2013, oil on board, 30 x 30cm

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Figure 66. Lynden Stone Klein bottle meditation – pencil #2 (yellow) (from the Meditations on Klein bottles series) 2013, oil on board, 30 x 30cm

Figure 67. Lynden Stone Klein bottle meditation – mirror #1 (yellow) (from the Meditations on Klein bottles series) 2013, oil on board, 30 x 30cm

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Figure 68. Lynden Stone Klein bottle meditation – mirror #2 (pink) (from the Meditations on Klein bottles series) 2013, oil on board, 30 x 30cm

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Figure 69. Lynden Stone The dynamic relationship between observation and creation # 1 (Space Invaders) 2013, oil on canvas, 150 x 110cm

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Figure 70. Lynden Stone, The dynamic relationship between observation and creation # 2 (QIX) 2013, oil on canvas, 96 x 120cm

Figure 71. Parts of the Klein bottle, from theorist Paul Ryan’s graphic linear schemata for the Klein bottle. See footnote 13.

I understand the three-dimensional Klein bottle to be self-referential; at once describing the continual creative dynamic and interplay of subject, object and

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space similar to our own possible creative role as participants in the dynamical relationship between observation and creation of matter at the quantum (and possibly macroscopic) level. Like the inhabitants in Edwin Abbott’s novel Flatland15 who can only comprehend two dimensions, the Klein bottle’s world of four dimensions is incomprehensible to me. I am apparently stuck in three physical dimensions, reduced to metaphorical devices.

My Meditations on Klein bottles series (figures 65, 66, 67 and 68) is a meditation on the object; a careful, sustained look at their materiality in three dimensions and, ultimately, an act of material creation through this observation. The deliberate obfuscation of boundary between bottle and background forces the viewer, if desired, to complete, in their own mind, the objective delineation between space and physical object. In The dynamic relationship between observation and creation # 1 (Space Invaders) (2013) (figure 69) and The dynamic relationship between observation and creation # 2 (QIX) (2013) (figure 70), the object of the Klein bottle itself is described only in terms of how light (photons) is refracted through it.

The metaphorical use of the Klein bottle in all these works brings together two ideas (the Klein bottle and the interdependent relationship between subject and object in quantum theory) that were not yet associated (in the visual form presented by me) and may result in “inducing alterations within a conceptual system or even a shift to a new system”. 16 Arguably, the simple visual perception of these paintings may not have this effect. I propose to supplement the works with the following didactic statement to aid in viewer comprehension of the metaphor: As suggested by Steven Rosen17, the Klein bottle is a useful tool in re- considering our subjective relationship with quantum (and macroscopic) phenomena. In three dimensions, the Klein bottle pierces itself to demonstrate its continuous, non-orientational surface. But represented in three-dimensional space, the Klein bottle is mis-described. Rather, it is a creature of four spatial dimensions where it is both open and closed and continuously one-sided without the need for self-penetration. I understand the four-dimensional Klein bottle to be self-referential, at once, describing the continual creative dynamic and interplay of subject, object and space similar to our own creative role as participants in the dynamical relationship between observation and creation of matter at the quantum (and possibly macroscopic) level.

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Loss of metaphorical character because of conventional use In the intellectualist account, metaphors play a special part in cognition because of their power to restructure our conceptual systems and express what has not been expressed before in either image or word. 18 However, over time, the intellectualists admit the possibility of metaphors losing their metaphorical character because of conventional use. An example of this is seen in Robert Hollingsworth’s paintings (figures 72 and 73) that I discussed in Chapter 4. The paintings are abstract, yet structured in a Rorschach-like manner that results in either vertical or horizontal axes. Blooms of repeated shape and colour, tonal contrasts and spotting all assist in giving the effect of abstracted movement and dynamism of some energetic system. The paintings are reminiscent of what we imagine as galaxies or cosmological explosions. The titles, The Space Between, Schrödinger’s Cat – Cosmic split and the other alternative, Event Horizon, Lightspeed, Devil’s Head Nebula and Exoplanet are all suggestive of cosmological phenomena. Their strong correspondence to our conventional understanding of cosmology, and how it is represented in science by conventional representation and extrapolation of telescopic imaging, is too obvious, does not elucidate quantum concepts and, I consider, fails to evoke new understandings. The conventions of the cosmological metaphor detracts from Hollingworth’s assertion that the paintings act as an expression of “equally valid alternative realities or ‘truths’ which may co-exist” according to the quantum many-worlds theory.

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Figure 72. Robert Hollingworth Event Horizon 2012, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 99cm

Figure 73. Robert Hollingworth Lightspeed 2012, acrylic on canvas, 99 x 84cm

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The intellectualists’ account of the metaphor, however, is subject to the empiricists’ criticism that metaphors fail if they do not correspond to the way things are.19 The objects we experience, such as glass bottles, have defined edges and we do not seem to have a creative role in manifesting them or any other physical objects; therefore, arguably, the Klein bottle metaphor does not fit. The empiricists and the intellectualists disagree because of a philosophical divide concerning objectivity and subjectivity. This philosophical divide, however, is precisely what the artist who engages in quantum concepts attempts to address. The artist seeks to shake the empiricist foundation of the belief in objective, knowable, mind-independent reality.

The experientialist model Johnson and Erickson and others 20 propose an alternative to the empiricism/intellectual philosophical divide: the “experientialist” basis of metaphor. This device gives the artist aiming to represent quantum concepts an even stronger foundation than the intellectualist account for metaphorical justification in artworks. Johnson and Erickson propose that metaphors work because of the way humans use the objective world to construct meaning. In line with a phenomenal approach, Johnson and Erickson propose that the subject (say, the viewer) is viewed as a “pre-objective being” who is in the process of gaining a more objective understanding of themselves and the world. Within a conceptual system, “some beings are more fully objectified than others”. 21 Through a dynamic relationship between the subject and object (say, the thing or image viewed) the pre-objective being continues to construct meaning and understanding. This pre-objectification level is also pre- conceptual, where ideas are yet to solidify into firm concepts. It is at this point that the metaphor can be used to solicit, support, anticipate, and bear conceptual meaning in the ongoing, dynamic process of determining both objects and the subject herself. The authors note that this idea is not new or exotic, and indeed their system draws its basis from the phenomenological approach promoted by Edmund Husserl, 22 Martin Heidegger 23 and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.24

Johnson and Erickson’s assertion of the subject (in the process of defining oneself and becoming more objective and determinate) as the “pre-objective

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being” has some resonance with the quantum theory that proposes a fundamental interrelationship between observation, consciousness and material result. In particular, it bears analogy to physicist John Archibald Wheeler’s view of a “participatory universe” that emphasises the role of the observer in creating observed phenomena. “The dependence of what is observed upon the choice of experimental arrangement”, he says, “conflicts with the view that the universe exists ‘out there’ independent of all acts of observation”.25 No phenomenon is a phenomenon until observed, and in this sense it is a “participatory universe”.26 This idea of the participatory universe and the assertion of the role of the observer in quantum collapse and, possibly, in creating material reality is what I seek to metaphorically evoke in many of my works. For instance, in The superposition of Neville’s brain, also known as Wigner’s Friend (2010—13) (figures 17 and 56), the metaphor “observation equates to matter” is evoked through Neville’s looking into the microscope and the viewer’s observation through the peephole. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, the viewer, in peeping through the hole, has the unnerving experience of feeling linked to the workings of Neville’s brain through the system relayed metaphorically via the structure of the painted image and actual wires. This is an unexpected and different experience to conventional reality where we do not share the conscious occurrences of others. In addition, the interactive devices in my ‘mind works’ projects that I will discuss more fully in the next chapter, at their simplest level, act metaphorically for the observer/viewer’s participatory role in creating the material universe.

Both the intellectualist approach and Johnson and Erickson’s experiential approach to metaphor posit the fundamental role of the metaphor in creating new knowledge without some immediate literal equivalent. 27 Metaphors that have literal equivalents, such as Robert Hollingworth’s paintings mentioned earlier, fail to evoke new connections due to the metaphor’s strong correspondence to existing concepts. The artist who uses metaphor to convey quantum concepts through the intellectualist and experiential models is capable of creating new understandings and relationships where none previously existed in the mind of the viewer. For example, in Peter practiced every day with his Everett box (figure 29), the mirror box suggests the existence of parallel universes. Spread-out parts in concert with discernable figurative elements

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indicate the dynamical relationship between observer and observed (such as Gormley’s Quantum Cloud, figure 18, and Voss-Andreae’s Quantum Man, figure 6). Peephole devices indicate the subjective role of observation in quantum theory (such as The superposition of Neville’s brain, also known as Wigner’s friend, figure 17, and Dribblejuice, figures 22, 23, 24 and 25). The binding nature of human relationships in Jonathon Keats’ Quantum Entanglement (figures 48 and 49) is a metaphor for quantum entanglement. And the separate, rearrangeable tiles in A reminder of nows (figures 54 and 55) are physical manifestations of moments of time.

A psychological model – Thomas Frentz Explicitly missing from the intellectualist and experientialist accounts is a psychological explanation of how metaphors work to create new meaning and understanding. Frentz observes this lack of explanation and proposes a psychological method by which this might happen. 28 While I have until now been discussing and analysing the perception of a metaphor and the effect on the viewer, Frentz’s model hypothesises of how a metaphor might be created by the author (in my case the artist) at a psychological level.

While supporting the claim that the metaphor is capable of evoking new understanding concerning quantum mechanics, Frentz’s model also suggests that the psychological process of creating or interpreting a metaphor involves quantum processes occurring in the mind of the artist or viewer. For my purposes of explaining how a creative metaphor may be made by an artist or interpreted by a viewer, this offers a useful parallel of related concepts. It resonates with Chalmer’s idea that quantum mechanics “might play a role in characterising the psychophysical link” between consciousness and the physical world.29 As well as the idea, outlined in Chapter 3 that, in orthodox quantum theory, the observer’s consciousness plays a dynamical role in changing quantum states from possibilities to actualities. It also resonates with Arnheim’s isomorphic metaphoric correspondence of structure in that the quantum concept that the viewer might be grappling to understand in an artwork may correspond to part of the viewer’s cognitive architecture used in comprehension.

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In Frentz’s opinion, the relevant, key commentators on the metaphor30 allude to thought and thinking in the metaphorical creative process but fail to advance a theoretical psychological framework.31 For example, in Johnson and Erickson’s account of the experiential metaphor, no explanation on a psychological level is proffered by those authors for how the “pre-objective being” processes pre- conceptual concepts via the metaphor that leads to gaining objective determinations of both objects and the subject herself. Frentz’s model, however, is based on Carl Jung’s formulation of depth psychology to explain how this process might work. In particular, Frentz accepts Jung’s concepts of the collective unconscious, the psychic instincts of the universal archetypes, and the principle of synchronicity proposed by Jung.

Frentz’s alliance to the metaphysics of Jungian psychology could be the main point of criticism against and rejection of his model, particularly by the proponents of conventional reality. However, quantum concepts give reasons to doubt conventional reality. They propose that the extent of reality is beyond a materialist or empiricist account. Quantum theory suggests that consciousness may be an active agent in quantum processes. For these reasons, I persevere with Frentz’s model since it may provide insight into creative metaphors that generate new knowledge without some immediate literal equivalent.

For Frentz, Jungian synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidences”, could provide the prototype for his psychological account of how the creative metaphor is shaped by the author/artist. 32 An example of synchronicity Frentz mentions Jung’s story of the scarabaeoid beetle, whose gold-green colour resembles that of a golden scarab, that is tapping at his window at the moment that his patient is telling him about her dream of being handed a piece of gold jewellery in the shape of a scarab beetle. Another example is the story of the wife of one of Jung’s patients for whom a flock of birds had been a harbinger of death and who foresaw her husband’s death when a flock descended on her house.33 Synchronicity defies causality in the material world. Jung explains it as an image arising from universal archetypes in the collective unconscious that comes into the consciousness of a person either literally (such as the flock of birds) or symbolised or suggested. This coincides with an objective situation.34 Jung believed that synchronistic experiences tap into archetypes of the

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collective unconscious because there is always a heightened effect on the people who experience them. This effect or “specific charge” on people is the power of synchronicities to change, sometimes in a radical way, the people experiencing them.35

In Frentz’s view, metaphors are similar to synchronistic experiences. Both are accompanied by a heightened effect; both contain two parts (for synchronicities it is a conscious and unconscious occurrence and for creative metaphors, arguably, there is a literal and figurative tension); and insight is gained for those who experience or produce them. Accordingly, Frentz proposes, if creative metaphors are language (and, by my assertions, visual) forms of synchronicities, “then perhaps metaphors, like synchronicities, are somehow related to the collective unconscious before they are expressed”. (Perhaps the collective unconscious is the undefined source of the “pre-objective being” in an extrapolated Johnson and Erickson account?) At this point, Frentz departs from Jung, unable to find any definitive structure of the collective unconscious further than Jung’s assertion that it is the archetypes (composed of psychic instincts) that constitute the structure of the collective unconscious.36 Frentz therefore proposes that quantum physics might provide an explanation of how the collective unconscious might be accessed by the mind. Not surprisingly, he focuses on the theory propounded by Bohm (who developed the non-collapse hidden variables theory) of a holistic, interconnected universe. Bohm’s view was “that the ultimate foundation of physical reality [is] an undivided whole".37

Frentz acknowledges that Bohm’s non-collapse quantum theory involving a unified metaphysical and objective world is controversial. Traditionalists regard his theory as marginal and radical. Frentz nevertheless invokes it because he believes it can explain how Jung’s collective unconscious and archetypes are accessed and, ultimately, explain creative metaphors. In Bohm’s theory of quantum ontology, the physical universe of discrete matter (the explicate order) unfolds from the underlying connected metaphysical implicate order that contains all potentials. But matter can also revert back by an enfolding process from the explicate order into the implicate order as a potential, and so on, back and forth. Highlighting one of the main attacks that quantum mechanics makes on conventional reality, Bohm’s theory indicates that reality does not stop at

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what we think of as conventional reality and is more than merely physical matter. In Frentz’s analysis, Bohm’s theory of the implicate order equates to Jung’s collective unconscious.

Jung asserted that archetypes had properties of both matter and mind and Frentz draws on physicist David Peat’s earlier link between Bohm’s implicate and explicate orders and Jungian psyche and synchronicity. Peat said, If mind and matter can be understood as emerging out of a common order, then it will no longer be helpful to think of them both as distinct substances but rather as inseparable manifestations of the one undivided whole….Our thoughts are the explicate forms thrown up by the underlying movements of the implicate orders of the mind.38

From these bases, Frentz gives his account of what might happen, psychologically, to an author in the process of producing a creative metaphor. He considers that before production, an impasse will be experienced; for my purposes, this describes the artist being troubled by an inability to find a metaphor for the many-worlds theory’s suggestion that our viewpoint of the world is entirely subjective. Frentz says that in such a case, re-ordering pre- existing knowledge will not work, as something genuinely new is required. In trying to find an appropriate metaphor, anxiety will increase in the mind of the artist. Then, in a self-stoking cycle, heightened anxieties trigger escalated efforts, escalated efforts further intensify the anxieties, which in turn redouble the efforts, and so on. I think this anxiety/effort spiral is the psychological precursor of a creative metaphor.39

If the impasse is unresolved, the impasse itself enfolds back into the wholeness of the collective unconscious “where the energy concentrations of the archetypes represent unrealized semantic knowledge potentials”. 40 Here, the impasse, enfolded within the collective, is “reconfigured in some novel way as an energy concentration”41 to unfold back, finally, into consciousness.

Frentz’s scheme is controversial, and reliant on unverifiable theories of the psyche and quantum ontology. However, specific contemporary theorists of the mind entertain the possibility that consciousness and quantum processes have a direct interrelationship.42 In addition, Frentz’s model has some support from

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Jung and Pauli.43 In Jung’s supplement to On the Nature of the Psyche, and relying on correspondence that he cited from Pauli, he states: The application of statistical laws to processes of atomic dimensions in physics has a remarkable correspondence in psychology insofar as it pursues the foundations of consciousness to the point where they dim out into the inconceivable and where only effects of ordering influences on to conscious contents can be detected.44

Jung and Pauli made an analogy between, on the one hand, the process of measurement in physics to distill the holistic reality of the quantum realm into a local reality, and on the other, the process in psychology of becoming consciously aware of subjective reality arising from holistic unconscious contents. They saw parallels between the transition from mental and material holistic realities to mental and material local realities in both quantum observation and conscious awareness.45 And similar to Frentz’s suggestion of the two-way interaction of the enfolding and unfolding in his model, according to Jung and Pauli, the transition between holistic and local realms is bi- directional.46

Frentz’s model holds attraction for the artist who is aware of the tussle that the creative act can entail. This can be a process of trial, error, frustration, the passing of time, and eventual moment of revelation and solution. In my case, I grappled for some time to find a way of metaphorically suggesting the subjectively relative view of universe that the many-worlds theory proposes. The final version of Dribblejuice (2010—12) (figures 22, 23, 24 and 25) was preceded by many iterations — first, a large-format square painting; then a large rectangular painting; and then additions and subtractions of various elements. At each stage, I felt frustrated and wished to bring some unconventional element to the work. At some point, I bought a small, novelty viewing device, without any ulterior purpose, that sat on a shelf in my studio for many months. Randomly, and in one moment, the fully formed idea came to me to incorporate the viewing device into the work and to mount a much smaller version of the painting horizontally above. This satisfied my requirement to present the work in a way that would upset viewing conventions and require the viewer to observe the work through irregular means to gain an understanding of the work. Dribblejuice’s viewing method which forces a discrete and initially

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confusing observation of an image through a small peephole, metaphorically relates to the notion that, in the many-worlds theory, one person’s version of the world is entirely relative to their view.

Frentz’s model addresses how creative metaphors might be shaped in the mind of the author. However, can his model be applied to assess the effectiveness of the metaphor from the viewer’s, rather than the creator’s, experience? Frentz has briefly addressed this question and assumes (perhaps naively, he admits) that the processes by which metaphors are created would be reversed for perception.47 I understand Frentz to mean that a viewer of an artwork perceives its metaphorical image, might be confused by it and wrestle to understand it, and, their increasing perplexity and anxiety caused by the image, leads to an impasse. Through the viewer’s consciousness, the conceptual impasse might become enfolded, through quantum processes, into the collective unconscious and then unfolded back, finally, into consciousness with new insight.

Additionally, the Frentz model focuses on how language-based creative metaphors are invented. Can his model be applied to creative metaphors that arise through perceptual images? (I am restricting my discussion to metaphors perceived directly by the viewer as opposed to mental images that arise in the mind.) There do not seem to be any constraints within the model to an application to perceptual imagery, and Frentz, himself has no objections to my doing so.48

In conclusion, I have demonstrated that the empiricist account of the metaphor will not be accepted by the artist engaging in quantum concepts who seeks to induce new understandings. The empiricist grounding of the metaphor is antithetical to the quantum world that the artist seeks to evoke. The intellectualist and experientialist model of the metaphor, however, is helpful to the artist. This model accepts that the metaphor can create new relationships and understandings without the need for an immediate literal equivalent. Frentz’s psychological model of how a metaphor is created and interpreted in the mind of the artist and viewer respectively, while highly controversial, nevertheless has appeal for the artist engaged in quantum concepts. The appeal is particularly due to Frentz’s evocation of Bohm’s quantum theory of the

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implicate and explicate order that gives a subjective and creative role to the observer through consciousness in relation to her experience of the world.

In the next chapter, I will discuss the artist’s considered use of materiality. ______

1 Cited in Karol Berger, A Theory of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 219n10, 11 and 12. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 223. 4 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3. 5 Whether thinking occurs in words or images, or as some cognitive scientists would argue in abstract symbols according to mathematical logic, is unresolved. Mathematician Henri Poincare thought that scientific research of the highest order required thinking in images: see Arthur Miller, Imagery in Scientific Thought: Creating 20th-Century Physics (Cambridge Mass: The MIT Press, 1987), 222. Arguing against Edward Sapir’s assertion that speech was the only road to thought, Rudolf Arnheim considered words were aids to the more appropriate thinking in visual imagery: see Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkley: University of California Press, 1969), 228 at 231—32. Arthur Miller gives a good account of cognitive science’s information-processing paradigm of thinking of the mind as a symbol-manipulating machine as well as the division in cognitive science between those who regard imagery fundamental in thinking and those who consider it that mental images have no causal role in though processes: Miller, Images in Scientific Thought , 223—26. 6 Mark Johnson, and Glenn Erickson, “Toward a New Theory of Metaphor,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 18, no. 3 (1980): 289–99. 7 Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8. 8 Johnson and Erickson, “Toward a New Theory of Metaphor,” 290. 9 Ibid., 291. 10 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 130. 11 Johnson and Erickson, “Toward a New Theory of Metaphor,” 292, original emphasis. 12 A Klein bottle is a non-Euclidean mathematical form with a one-sided surface. It has no inside or outside. 13 Steven Rosen, “Quantum Gravity and Phenomenological Philosophy,” Foundations of Physics 38, no. 6 (2008): 556–82. 14 Paul Ryan, Video Mind/ Earth Mind, (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 98 reproduced in Steven Rosen, “Quantum Gravity and Phenomenological Philosophy,” 567. 15 Edwin Abbott, Flatland, ed. Rosemary Jann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1884] 2006). 16 Johnson and Erickson, “Toward a New Theory of Metaphor,” 292, original emphasis. 17 Steven Rosen, “Quantum Gravity and Phenomenological Philosophy.” 18 Johnson and Erickson, “Toward a New Theory of Metaphor,” 292.

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19 Ibid., 293. 20 See also Mark Johnson’s formulation of the experientialist model with George Lakoff in Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. 21 Ibid., 294. 22 Husserl (1859—1938) was a German philosopher and the principle founder of phenomenology. 23 Heidegger (1889 – 1976) was a German philosopher who assisted in the development of phenomenology. 24 Merleau-Ponty (1908—1961) was a French philosopher who was influenced by the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger. 25 John Archibald Wheeler, “Law Without Law,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John Archibald Wheeler & Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 184. 26 John Archibald Wheeler, “The ‘Past’ and the ‘Delayed-Choice’ Double-Slit Experiment,” in Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory, ed. A.R. Marlow (New York: Academic Press, 1978) 41. 27 See also Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 139 and 144. 28 Thomas Frentz, “Creative Metaphors, Synchronicity, and Quantum Physics,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 44, no. 2 (2011): 101–28. 29 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 333. 30 Frentz identifies for his purposes, the relevant key thinkers and their texts on the metaphor as: Ivor Armstrong Richards The Philosophy of Rhetoric (London: Oxford University Press, 1936); Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962); and Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of the Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 31 Frentz, “Creative Metaphors, Synchronicity, and Quantum Physics,” 110. 32 Ibid., 114. 33 Carl Jung, cited in Frentz, “Creative Metaphors, Synchronicity, and Quantum Physics,” 115–16. 34 Ibid., 116. 35 Ibid., 117. 36 Ibid., 118. 37 David Bohm cited in Frentz, “Creative Metaphors, Synchronicity, and Quantum Physics,” 119. 38 David Peat, cited in Frentz, “Creative Metaphors, Synchronicity, and Quantum Physics,” 121—22. 39 Frentz, “Creative Metaphors, Synchronicity, and Quantum Physics,” 123. 40 Ibid., 123. 41 Ibid. 42 Carolin S. Keutzer, “The Power of Meaning: From Quantum Mechanics to Synchronicity,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 24, no. 1 (1984) 80-93; Harald Atmanspacher and Wolfgang Frach, “A Structural-Phenomenological Typology of Mind-Matter Correlations,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 58 (2013): 219–44; Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, “A Modular Model of

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Mind/Matter Manifestations (M5),” Journal of Scientific Exploration 15, no. 3 (2001): 299–329; David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search Of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 43 Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli met in 1932 but commenced “intense” discussions and communication between 1946 and 1958 over the relationship between the psychological and quantum physics: see Atmanspacher and Frach, “A structural-phenomenological typology of mind-matter correlations,” 221. 44 Carl Jung,”On the Nature of the Psyche” (1969), cited in ibid., 226. 45 Atmanspacher and Frach “A Structural-Phenomenological Typology of Mind- Matter Correlations,” 225. 46 Ibid., 226. 47 Thomas Frentz, email to the author, 23 September 2013. 48 Ibid.

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Chapter 8 Considerations of materiality

Introduction This is the final of three chapters that address the question of how an artist who engages in quantum concepts can convey meaning and cognition, and so enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality. Here, I argue that the artist’s consideration of materiality takes on special significance because the quantum realm is pre-material, and because of the quantum theory that matter may not be independent of consciousness.1

In Chapter 2, I outlined how the idea of reality could extend past physical, material reality to include the mind and consciousness. As a result of the assault that quantum theories make on our ideas of material reality, astrophysicist Sir James Jeans thought “…the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine”.2 In Chapter 3, I introduced the idea that consciousness might have a unique role in the collapse of quantum superposition and in Chapter 9 I will develop this idea further with the example of my ‘mind works’ projects. An observer of these works might be able to intentionally collapse quantum superposition and affect or create material reality. In Chapter 9, I discuss theories of how consciousness might interact with superposition to affect of create material reality. Wigner, noting that because the successes of mechanistic view of the world was now restricted “to a narrow range of phenomena, all in the macroscopic domain” and that the concept of consciousness had entered quantum theories, perceived a return to Descartes’ notion of Cogito ergo sum “which recognises the thought… the mind, as primary”.3

As quantum concepts involve pre-material concepts of superposition, entanglement, and (possibly) consciousness, the materials from our macroscopic world may be inadequate to convey these ideas. The artist who engages with quantum concepts is particularly conscious of material choices.

The ephemeral moving image

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One might conclude that because quantum concepts are about pre-material states, the artist may be inclined to limit materiality. Certainly, there is an argument for the low-material, ephemeral nature of projection and Daniel Crooks’ Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) (2010) (figures 7, 8 and 9), without the heaviness of physical materials, is suggestive of the humanly imperceptible reality of a state of superposition. Through the medium of the moving image, the changing, but wholly connected image conjures inter-related, flowing states in which possibilities for movement exist throughout. Even though this content-rich work implies hours of intensive editing, the viewer —who stands in a darkened room with light streaming conically from the projector onto a simple white flat screen — has the impression of a lack of real materiality in the work, which has a mesmerising and captivating effect that encourages the viewer to stay with and contemplate the work.

Evocation of materiality Materiality and solidity, however, are essential components in Voss-Andreae’s Quantum Man (2007) (figure 6). This sculpture is informed by the artist’s first- hand understanding of the extension of quantum superposition into objects that can be viewed in the macroscopic world. When viewing Quantum Man front-on, the solid nature of the form is revealed. It is only the ingenious placement of the thin end of the steel sections that, when viewed side on, causes the figure to all but disappear.

And although Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud (1999) (figure 18) is vast (5.5 kilometres of steel weighing nearly 50 tonnes4) and comprises numerous steel sections, its enormous scale suggests that material things may not be as dense and solid as we may think. Solid-ness and mass-ness of objects are due to the forces that atomic components of objects exert on each other to keep them separated or together. In the BBC production The Story of Science, Michael Mosely makes the surprising claim that if you take away all the space between the material components of all the humans on earth, the remaining material would be the size of a sugar cube.5 Due to its large scale, Quantum Cloud suggests this minimal materiality of physical reality; the separated parts emphasise vacant areas of space. For both Voss-Andreae and Gormley, the use and evocation of materiality is essential to enable the viewer to experience

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the corollary sense of immateriality. When experiencing either Quantum Man or Quantum Cloud, this sense of immateriality happens when the observer moves around the work and compares different viewing perspectives.

Similarly, the material-ness of the truncated figures in Denise Stewart- Sanabria’s Quantum Confusion (2010) (figures 30 and 31) is necessary to suggest dissipation of form and substance when moving through the portal of Plexiglas into some unknown parallel reality. And in my works A parallel alternative: Nixon and Khrushchev in the kitchen exchanging flatus (Moscow, 1959) (2013) (figures 34, 35, 36 and 37) and In another universe, my mother gave me the two Mars bars and love note from Robert Smeets (2013) (figures 19, 20 and 21), the materials, suggesting a forensic record from an alternative universe that exists beside and is indistinguishable from our own, is relevant to the conceptual aspect of the work.

The ‘mind works’ projects, the Metaphase Typewriter revival project, the Mind Lamp project and the Mind dispenser, rely on significant material aspects. However, it is the immaterial features of consciousness and how consciousness might create material reality that I endeavour to evoke in the viewer, which I will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter.

Minimising materiality In Quantum Entanglements (figures 48 and 49), Keats addresses the paradoxical nature of describing non-material quantum superposition in the material world by using little in the way of materiality. It is composed of a lens, a beta-barium borate crystal and a mirror secured to a small metal base plate installed in a window to catch the sun, a mat on the floor, some dangling mirror pieces, the latter only to fill aesthetic function. To engage with the work, couples simply stand in the light that streams through the window. While couples interact with the device, nothing appears to be happening or what might be happening is not physically discernable.

The minimal materiality of the work starkly contrasts with the expansive and confounding ideas behind superposition and entanglement. Yet, it is the imperceptible effect of Keats’ device that delivers the conceptual punch to the

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viewer. Quantum systems can remain entangled; connected in some, as yet, inexplicable way over time and space. By applying quantum entanglement to human relationships, Keats asks us to consider how entanglement may result in universal interconnectivity. In an intertwined and perceptive human relationship, an event happening to one person might be able to instantly affect the other, no matter how far apart they are. Keats’ Quantum Entanglements, through immaterial means, enables participating couples to contemplate how their own relationship might be entangled through imperceptible forces.

Working across media and materials, McKenna is cognisant of the impressions the various materials give to the viewer. The low-materiality of her projection Quantizing Portents (figure 47), is critical to enabling the viewer to loosen their grip on ordinary reality. Ideally, it is projected in large format in a darkened space. McKenna’s concern is to immerse the viewer in an environment separated from ordinary reality, but also to make the viewer feel at ease, so as to “allow that anxiety of normality to recede and allow other parts of the brain that are often suppressed to come to the fore”.6 McKenna believes that it is easy to trick the viewer’s brain to believe in alternate realities when it is relaxed. Additionally, she considers that a darkened projection room facilitates viewers to lose track of time, and focus on images, “zoning out in a way to allow the [the viewer’s] subconscious [to] rise to the top”.7 Projecting the video, effectively using light and space (as opposed to display via a monitor) is crucial to McKenna: “the glow that comes from a projector image almost feels like life itself is being breathed into the work”.8

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My installation Dribblejuice (figures 22, 23, 24 and 25) was initially exhibited using more substantial material elements. In my solo show No Singular Reality at the QCA in April 2012, Dribblejuice was installed on a 3m x 3m drop of wallpaper that repeated the pattern of the curtain (based on an alpha-amylase

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molecule that is present as a protein in saliva). Additionally, a life-sized, full- body painting of my sister, Dixie, as a child was leant on the wall (figure 74). While I was drawn to the narrative content that these additional elements bring to Dribblejuice, I prefer the lighter materiality of the installation without them. The narrative content of the work is obscured by the more minimal version of Dribblejuice and, because the viewer has to work for the content to be revealed by sitting on the tiny chair and looking through the view-finder. I consider this, however, evokes a more expansive experience for the viewer than if more material aspects were present to carry the content.

As quantum mechanics suggests an imperceptible reality of pre-material states, artists are particularly attentive to materials they use when engaging with quantum concepts. The phenomenal features that can be experienced by a viewer through the low materiality of projection is particularly useful in enticing the viewer into a different reality of the artist’s making. However, as I have demonstrated, artists use materiality to their advantage engaging with physical substances to suggest non-material and imperceptible concerns such as space, concurrently occurring dual traits, branching, parallel universes and entanglement effects.

In the next chapter, I will discuss and analyse my ‘mind works’ projects in terms of all the tools of conceptual engagement, provocation of unconventional thinking, and considerations of materiality and metaphor that are in the artist’s toolkit in engaging with quantum concepts to enable the viewer to doubt conventional reality.

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1 For example: physicist Jack Sarfatti said: “In my opinion, the quantum principle involves mind in an essential way […such that] the structure of matter may not be independent of consciousness!...Some component of the quantum probability involves the turbulent creative sublayer of ideas in the mind of the “participator”: cited in David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture and the Quantum Revival (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 65; see also: Jack Sarfatti, "Implications of Meta-Physics for Psychoenergetic Systems," Psychoenergetic Systems 1 (1974), 3—4 and 7, cited in Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, 65, original emphasis; Evan Harris Walker, The Physics

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of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge: Perseus, 2000); Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: an Alternative to Materialism,” Zygon, 41, no. 3 (2006): 599–615, doi: 10.1111/j.1467- 9744.2005.00762.x; Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: II: the Libet and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Causal Anomalies,” Erkenntnis, 65 (2006): 117– 42, doi: 10.1007/s10670-006-9017-y; Imants Barušs, “Quantum mind: Conscious intention in the context of quantum mechanics,” Dydaktyka Literatury, 28 (2008): 31–40; Richard Bartlett, Matrix Energetics: The Science and Art of Transformation (New York: Atria Books, 2007). 2 Sir James Jeans cited in Bernard Haisch, The God Theory (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2006), xii. 3 Eugene Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press) [1961] 1983), 168. 4 “Case Study: The Design and Analysis of “Quantum Cloud,” Lucas Finite Element Analysis structural engineering analysis, http://www.lusas.com/case/civil/gormley.html. 5 “What Is the World Made of?” The Story of Science, Episode 2, DVD (London, 2011). 6 Lucy McKenna, email to the author, 27 August 2013. 7 Lucy McKenna, email to author, 28 August 2013. 8 Ibid.

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Chapter 9 The mind works projects

Introduction Of all my artworks discussed in this exegesis, my three ‘mind works’ projects make the most substantial assault on ideas of conventional reality. They suggest the possibility that there is a primary role for the observer in obtaining information about the world. Further, based on some accounts, they suggest that that the observer’s consciousness could be the agency by which fundamental particles move from states of superposition into material reality.1

The basis for this claim is that, they provide actual quantum random events2 with which the viewer can interact to affect or create material reality. While many of my other works are interactive, they only offer, through peepholes, view finders and alternate vantage points, metaphorical acts of quantum collapse or resulting subjective views. In the ‘mind works’ projects however, the viewer is invited to interact directly with quantum events. The viewer has an immediate sense that if their own consciousness can affect or create material reality, then conventional reality must be more than an objective, material, mind- independent world.

The ‘mind works’ projects represent both metaphorically and, arguably, literally John Wheeler’s participatory universe: 3 the idea that conscious observation equates to physical matter. All three works present opportunities for the viewer to directly interact with them, allowing expectations of conventional reality to be potentially ruptured. I will describe and analyse each of these below.

The Metaphase Typewriter revival project In the QCA Webb gallery, a laptop, its keyboard covered with black Perspex, is installed on a plinth. The viewer approaches the laptop screen, drawn in by its sound, a blinking red light and continual lines of green “0”s, “1”s, numbers and text arriving at the bottom of the screen. Eric, one of the laptop’s the text-to- voice readers sonorously announces the lines of words that appear against a black background. The Perspex reflects the lines of numbers and text. A constant clicking accompanies the appearance of the ‘0’s and ‘1’s. In front of

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the laptop, a silver box contains a gadget with a blinking red light. The viewer reads a notice affixed to the wall:

The Metaphase Typewriter is a quantum communication device that allows all forms of consciousness (bodied and disembodied) to interact with it.

Use your mind to affect the output of words and sentences.

Concentrate on the output of "0"s and "1"s being generated to replace the question marks at the bottom of the screen. Relax and be confident that you can affect the generation of these numbers to produce the words you want.

The Metaphase Typewriter revival project (2012) (figures 1, 75, 76 and 77) offers an opportunity to the viewer, through interacting with quantum random events, to test the idea that consciousness might collapse quantum superposition to affect or even create material reality.

Figure 75. Lynden Stone Metaphase typewriter revival project 2012, Geiger counter, gas lamp mantle, laptop, program, Perspex cover, dimensions variable, installation view. Photograph by Carl Warner.

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Figure 76. Lynden Stone Metaphase typewriter revival project 2012, Geiger counter, gas lamp mantle, laptop, program, Perspex cover, dimensions variable

Figure 77. Lynden Stone Metaphase typewriter revival project 2012, detail During my exhibition No Singular Reality4 in April 2012, where the Metaphase Typewriter revival project was exhibited, a viewer told me that, after spending time with the device in the gallery, it had “spooked” her “to the core” and she did

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not want to go near it again. She had perceived a connection with the output of words and her mind that had terrified her.

When this work is exhibited, the outputs are also streamed live to the Internet via the website www.damon.com/mtrp (where all outputs from the project can still be viewed on that site). One friend in America who interacted with the device over the Internet, reported to me that the words produced by the device had relevance to what he was thinking and intending, and he meditated in a connected state with the device for some time. My own revelatory experience with the Metaphase Typewriter revival project was unintentional and unexpected. In April 2012, I worked late into the evening to de-install the exhibition. I left the Metaphase Typewriter running while I was taking down other artwork, patching holes in the wall and re-painting. I liked the sound of Eric reading the words and sentences as they arrived in cadmium green on the black screen of the laptop. As the gallery emptied of work, Eric’s voice became more resonant in the space. He kept me company for several hours. Finally, there was nothing left to do but to shut down the program and turn off the computer. I was strangely reluctant, and maudlin. I did not want to end the process, to shut off Eric. I killed the switch. Reflecting later, Eric’s last output that night was oddly reflective of my own thoughts: it was “i, i the death into”. If the interactive elements of the ‘mind works’ projects do work to direct conscious intention and will to affect physical reality, they defy conventional reality.

For this work, I collaborated with American physicist Nick Herbert and programmer M.U. Shrooms. In 1970, Nick Herbert built a communication device, the “Metaphase Typewriter”, to test the ability of consciousness to probe quantum states to produce material outcomes. It comprised a radioactive source, a Geiger counter, a room of computers and a tele-typewriter. A computer program converted the frequency of random intervals of radioactive decay at the quantum level into an output of letters from the tele-typewriter based on their frequency of occurrence in the English language. I read about Herbert’s metaphase typewriter in 2011 in David Kaiser’s book, How the Hippies Saved Physics 5 and subsequently contacted Herbert, seeking his imprimatur to re-create his device as an artwork using contemporary technology.

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My device contains a radioactive source (a gas lamp mantle) and a Geiger counter (figure 77) that is connected to a laptop computer via a USB. Reading the radioactive decay (a quantum event) random bits are generated by the Geiger counter. These bits are then converted, via Shrooms’ program, into a number range that represents a word in a word list. The list is a modified version of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (a word list compiled by Professor Mark Davies at Brigham Young University for which we sought permission to use).6 The more frequently occurring words have a wider number range. Less frequent words are represented by a smaller number range or by just one number. Shrooms’ program allows for the possibility that, as random words are produced, simple sentence structures may form.

The frequency of decay does not strictly equate to the frequency of the word in the word list. The radioactive decay as read by the Geiger counter is simply a random event that produces a random number. It does not reflect the time interval between each decay event. We would need to know the number of particles available and usual/average rate of decay to add this into the program. So, to affect the output of a single word, consciousness must, in theory at least, interact with the device at each bit generation to effect a specific result.

The Mind Lamp project The Mind Lamp project, (2012 – 2013) (figures 78, 79, 80, 81 and 82), another installation, is a curious combination of music, video, and objects — including a plastic fish and a real banana. A notice on the wall asks the viewer to manoeuvre a hood (attached to the wall by a metal, articulated arm) over their head (figure 79). Using only their will and intention, the viewer is invited to change the colour of the light inside the hood. Similar to the Metaphase Typewriter revival project, this work provides the viewer with an opportunity to test their ability in using consciousness to affect a material output. However, through electron tunnelling, it provides a different form of quantum event and, unlike the Metaphase Typewriter revival project, is presented in a more conventional fine art sense, with the addition of two wall-mounted lenticular prints, a video with musical soundtrack 7 displayed on a monitor, and other objects. These additional elements add illustrative elements to the work,

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indicating how the viewer might be able to use only their consciousness to change the colour of the light.

The Mind Lamp project’s interactive hood uses the Mind Lamp, a “color- changing ambient device that can respond to your conscious or subconscious mind”,8 which is manufactured by Psyleron Enterprises (the commercial arm of Princeton Engineering Research Anomalies (PEAR) Laboratory, originally set up and operated by Princeton University9). It uses electron tunnelling as the basis of its technology. Electron tunnelling is quantum phenomena that have no correlation and is regarded as impossible in the macroscopic world of classical, Newtonian physics. In the Mind Lamp are two negatively charged barriers through which occasionally, as a quantum event, an electron manages to tunnel. The haphazard, random nature of this tunnelling generates a digital output. A microprocessor monitors the random event generator’s output looking for statistical patterns that are used to feed signals to an internal LED. These signals create eight possible mixtures of the primary colours of light: red, green, and blue. According to expected statistical behaviours, if there are eight colours, a one-in-eight chance of the LEDs producing that colour exists. So, the colour of the mind lamp is determined by this probabilistic, statistical behaviour as a result of randomly generated numbers that arise from a quantum event. However, Psyleron Enterprises claim that probabilistic systems have been demonstrated (by research undertaken by PEAR) to be influenced by the human mind to affect the output beyond chance expectations.10

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The Mind Lamp performance video (figure 80) demonstrates Psyleron’s Mind Lamp in action. The video records my daughter Madeline using various coloured objects and her concentrated mental efforts to change the colour of the lamp. During that performance, the lamp was positioned behind Madeline and she was unable to see the result of her activity. However, she had multiple successes, as the video indicates, in changing the lamp colour to the colour of

the object she was concentrating on.

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Figure 79. Lynden Stone Mind Lamp project 2012—13, installation views. Photographs by Renata Buziak.

Figure 80. Lynden Stone Mind Lamp performance (part of the Mind Lamp project) 2012—13, video stills

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Figure 81. Lynden Stone Mind Lamp project 2012—13, detail

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Figure 82. Lynden Stone Mind Lamp project 2012—13, detail

In the gallery, the viewer notices that some of the objects from the video are displayed. In addition, multiple still images from the Mind Lamp performance contained in two large-format prints (figures 81 and 82) are mounted on the wall. These are “three-flip” lenticular prints that change images according to the vantage point of the viewer. Madeline’s success in the video performance and

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the physical objects themselves encourage the viewer to make their own attempts to rupture conventional reality. By using the interactive hood and their concentrated intention, they, too may change the light to their desired colour.

The installation provides the opportunity of a phenomenal experience for the viewer both through opportunity of interaction with the interactive hood and in the way the shifting imagery of the lenticular prints changes depending on the vantage position of the observer. The three elements of video, hood and lenticular prints draw attention to how, in stark contrast to an objective, mind- independent reality, the viewer’s observation might act on the physical object.

The Mind dispenser project Installed further along on the gallery wall is a lolly-dispensing machine. The viewer pushes the large red ‘start’ button and the device begins to work. Five horizontal augers driven by motors push gobstoppers along tubes. Five corresponding vertical tubes feed the augers each with a different colour of lolly. A bright, arcade-style sign above the machine reads: THE MIND DISPENSER Use your mind to choose the coloured lolly you want

The viewer watches the race of coloured lollies, encouraging, through a concentrated effort of will, the lolly of their choice to be the first into the dispensing tube. Once one lolly reaches the end of the auger, it drops into the dispensing tray and the process stops. A willingness to engage with the device, as in the other two ‘mind works’ projects, already indicates some sort of rupture in expected reality. The viewer is at least prepared, for a short period, to suspend their belief that they cannot have an effect on the outcome to attempt to get the coloured lolly they want.

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Figure 83. Lynden Stone, Mind dispenser 2013, oil on board, Geiger counter, fluorescent wrist watch arms, microprocessor, motor drivers, optical detectors, wire, connecting board, pull type solenoids, plastic augers, metal and plastic lolly drop receiver, power supply, Perspex, Gobstoppers

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Figure 84. Lynden Stone Mind dispenser 2013, installation view. Photograph by Renata Buziak.

Figure 85. Lynden Stone Mind dispenser 2013, installation view. Photograph by Renata Buziak.

The Mind dispenser (2013) (figures 83, 84 and 85) is a collaborative project with Anderson Tepas, a final year undergraduate student in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering School at Griffith University, Brisbane, and Associate Professor Steven O’Keefe, the head that school. The device dispenses gobstoppers using electrical signals generated by a quantum random event generator (a Geiger counter reading random events of decay from a card of fluorescent wrist watch hands (assumed to contain thorium)). Using a four-bit generation system, sixteen possible numbers (‘1’ to ‘16’) are produced but only the numbers ‘1’ to ‘15’ are used. A microprocessor interprets the generated numbers and sends signals to either one of five motorised augers that

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correspond to the range of numbers linked to the colour of the gobstopper. The following generated numbers correspond to the following colours: 1,2, 3—blue 4, 5, 6—green 7, 8, 9—yellow 10, 11, 12—pink 13, 14, 15—red

In theory, any number could be assigned to any colour. However, Tepas, O’Keefe and I considered there to be some logic and elegance to equate the numbers to the wavelengths of light colours. Accordingly, ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’ are assigned to ‘blue’ as blue light has the shortest wavelength. Green light has a longer wavelength than blue —and is represented by the next three numbers — and so on.

From an initial equal starting position and depending on the frequency of signals, the augers turn, thereby advancing a different colour of gobstopper. Once one gobstopper out of the possible five is dispensed through the vertical dispensing tube, the augers reverse, resetting all undispensed lollies to the starting position.

Similar to the Mind Lamp’s probability of equally generating eight available colours over time, the Mind dispenser should, over time, dispense the five colours of gobstoppers equally. Indeed, my collaborators expect this to happen and disregard my purpose for the device. Their working title for the same project is: “The use of a Geiger Counter to generate random bits that will be used to determine the output of a system”. However, my purpose is to provide a device where the viewer’s intention can interfere with statistical probability. Specifically, to get the lolly of their choice, the viewer’s will is directed to quantum pre-material processes to cause to be generated more numbers in the range that relate to the coloured lolly of their choice. If this is achieved, it will disrupt statistical probability and the viewer’s choice of lolly will advance towards the dispensing tube. Do the ‘mind works’ projects work? I argue that the ‘mind works’ projects enable viewers to doubt conventional reality. Primarily, they do this in a direct and immediate way as devices that offer states of quantum superposition with which viewers can interact using only

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consciousness to, arguably, affect or create material output. A willing engagement with the devices brings to the fore, in the mind of the participant, the idea that consciousness might be able to affect the result. Ultimately, the viewer may fall back on, or never alter, their conviction in conventional reality, but the faculty of the device exists to enable the viewer to doubt conventional reality.

The willing engagement of the viewer, however, may reap material results. As I indicated in Chapter 3, one version of quantum theory accepts that observation or measurement causes collapse of pre-material quantum superposition into physical reality. On this basis, quantum theory is an empirical theory and there is no physical reality beyond observation and measurement. 11 Some mathematicians, physicists and theorists have extended this theory to suggest that the agency of the observer’s mind or consciousness causes quantum collapse.12 Further still, a highly controversial theory by a handful of physicists proposes that consciousness is the method by which material reality is created.13

Specific brain processes Scientists have nominated specific processes through which our brains and minds might interact with quantum processes to collapse quantum superposition into experienced reality. The least radical of these ideas is that of mathematician Sir Roger Penrose and anaesthetist Stuart Hameroff. 14 Their model proposes to explain how consciousness, as an emergent process, arises from quantum states in the brain and how quantum superposition might be collapsed in the brain. This process, they say, occurs in brain microtubules that remain in superposed states until they self-collapse through a procedure involving quantum gravity. The collapse “creates an instantaneous ‘now’ event. Sequences of such events create a flow of time, and consciousness.”15 In 2010, a team from the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney claimed to have disproved one of the bases on which the Penrose-Hameroff model was premised but conceded that a revised model might still be plausible.16 Penrose and Hameroff responded to this and other criticisms but still hold to the general precepts of their model.17

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If consciousness is an agent in quantum collapse of pre-material states to material reality, is it possible for a viewer of the ‘mind works’ projects to intentionally engage their consciousness in this process? The Penrose and Hameroff model (as one of self-collapse depending on quantum gravity processes) does not deal with the issue of volition in superposition collapse. Physicists Evan Harris Walker and Henry Stapp, however, have proposed separate specific methods by which our brains interact with quantum states resulting in chosen material outcomes. In addition, Director or PEAR Laboratory, Robert Jahn, and Lab Manager, Brenda Dunne, propose a model of mind-matter interaction that may be helpful for a viewer interacting with the ‘mind works’ projects. However, all of these models are highly controversial and not readily accepted among physical scientists.

The will channel Walker 18 considers consciousness to be the central key to reality, not the material body; it exists in its own right, distinct from material realities, revealed by physics or science.19 He suggests that electron tunnelling, occurring in the brain across synaptic gaps between nerve endings (representing a series of quantum events 20 ), is the process that carries out complex activities that creates our thoughts.21 Using research on synaptic functioning, Walker took a quantitative approach to identify three separate rates of data processing occurring across these synaptic gaps. The data rate for subconsciousness is one trillion bits per second; for consciousness, one hundred million bits per second; and for intention, the rate is ten thousand bits per second.22 The final rate of data processing for will or intention in his model serves as a “will channel” for the expression of volition. He proposed that before observation, the state of a quantum system is described as a range of possibilities. In the brain, this range of possibilities arises in the synapses that have the potential to fire. The will channel, in Walker’s view, determines our thoughts and choices. However, much more controversially, Walker says that the will channel is the link between, on the one hand, our consciousness and quantum processes in the brain, and, on the other, the events in the material world external to our minds. Walker asserts: “our mind can affect matter”.23 The “perfect observer”, he argues, will always get what he or she wants. However, we are not perfect observers because most of us lack “purity of mind” and are unable to distinguish

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the will channel from all of the other thoughts in our consciousness.24 The will channel, he asserts, carries much less data than the other channels, and can be drowned out by the “noise” from the conscious channel of the mind. Therefore, there is far less opportunity to manifest intention.25 However, in his view, it is nevertheless possible.

Injection of conscious intention In a similar vein, Stapp26 proposes that through quantum processes in the brain occurring around the synaptic cleft separating neurons, we can inject “conscious intentions efficaciously into the physically described world”.27 Stapp proposes that consciousness in the form of free choices operates outside currently known laws of quantum mechanics or classical physics. However, he proposes a model of how conscious intention of the observer might bridge the causal gap between quantum indeterminacy and material outcome. Ordinarily, he says, conscious intention of the observer does not dictate the result; usually, “nature” chooses one of the possible outcomes according to statistical rule.28 While the observer can freely choose the questions to put to nature, an answer is returned subject to classical statistical requirements. In this way, conscious intent gets “washed out by the quantum elements of randomness.”29 However, according to Stapp, this is not always the case; it is possible for conscious intention to dictate physical outcomes. He proposes a process whereby a rapid sequence of similar intentional acts through mental effort will cause, through the “quantum Zeno effect”, a holding-in-place of a “template for action”. The longer the template survives the more likely it will evolve and defeat other expected statistical probabilities.30 If the repetitions are sufficiently rapid then a well-known quantum effect, the quantum Zeno effect, will cause a long string of essential identical [processes]… This rapid sequence of events will, by virtue of the known quantum rules, tend to hold in place the associated template for action, and this will tend to cause the intended action to occur.31

Stapp equates the Zeno effect to the “watched pot never boils” idea; that is, that just watching something keeps it from changing.32 Through this effect, Stapp proposes that the mind can intentionally prevent quantum state changes that occur in the brain by intentionally holding onto desired outcomes and overriding

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other possibilities. In this way, says Stapp, our willful choices cause specific objective outcomes.33

Dynamic unconscious In contrast to Walker’s and Stapp’s propositions that conscious intention can affect material reality, Jahn and Dunne raise doubts that physical effects can be produced by direct conscious attention. After two decades of research into anomalous mind/matter interactions, they consider that evidence of conscious intention affecting material output is indeterminate. Instead, they propose that it is the “dynamic” unconscious mind (also referred to as the subconscious, preconscious, non-conscious or implicit mind) through which anomalous mental influence can be achieved upon otherwise inaccessible material processes.34 The dynamic unconscious, they say, is to be distinguished from the “procedural” unconscious processes that perform simple physiological and mental tasks.35 Their research indicates that information exchange between mind and matter was more successful where experimental strategies disengaged the conscious mind but stimulated unconscious connection with the task.36 In this regard, they propose that the dynamic unconscious may be accessed via a “fuzzy” altered state through methods, such as meditation, dream or trance, “where conceptual boundaries blur, categories fail, space and time evaporate, and uncertainty prevails”.37

I do not know if the ‘mind works’ projects actually work to allow the viewer to affect or create the material output. However, using the Jahn/Dunne model, the viewer should endeavour to induce a “fuzzy” state of mind when interacting with the works. In the gallery setting, this might be difficult but it could be achieved through meditation or a trance-induced state. However, their suggestion is that the viewer should not entertain a specific conscious intention to produce a result. This seems somewhat pointless when the object is to produce the word or light colour or lolly of choice. However, it does resonate with my peculiar experience with the Metaphase Typewriter revival project described earlier where I had no intention to affect the output of words, yet may have. If Walker’s model is correct, again, a meditative state in the viewer may be the method to intentionally access the will channel. The Stapp model, by contrast, requires a concentrated, determined and sustained effort of will.

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In the preceding chapters, I have outlined relevant tools available to the artist who engages with quantum concepts to enable the viewer to doubt conventional reality. To reiterate, these tools include a demonstration of the artist’s conceptual engagement with quantum concepts that are clearly reflected in the work; a provocation of unconventional thinking through the Arnheim and Stafford approaches; a consideration of materials; and a utilisation of metaphor, including the isomorphic structural correspondence metaphor, identified by Arnheim. I have just demonstrated that these ‘mind works’ projects reflect a clear conceptual engagement with quantum concepts as their basis. Using the other tools, I will now analyse how they enable the viewer to doubt conventional reality.

Provocation of unconventional thinking Due to its complex elements, the Mind Lamp project, (figures 78, 79, 70, 81 and 82) in particular, has the capacity to provoke the particular kinds of unconventional, non-linear thinking proposed by Arnheim and Stafford that I discussed in Chapter 6. The other two ‘mind works’ projects do not have the same level of disparate elements and visual complexity. The Mind Lamp project contains six discrete components: video, lenticular prints, interactive hood, a plastic fish and a banana on a shelf, and a pink jacket on a hook. This is a disparate group of objects, seemingly unrelated, and presented through two- dimensional, three-dimensional and moving digital forms. Their relationship and the artist’s purpose are not immediately evident. The viewer pauses (Stafford would say “stumbles”), wanting to make sense of the installation. Arnheim, whose model, as I indicated in Chapter 6, is based on the fundamental ordering and simplification desires of the human mind, would say the viewer searches for order and simplification, struggling to find meaning in the work.

The elements of the Mind Lamp project, however, installed as a group, bear relationship through proximity and repeated visual elements. The fish, banana and coat are used in the Mind Lamp performance video and are also in the images of the lenticular prints. The interactive hood, evidently a lampshade, is similar to the Mind Lamp itself in the video. The viewer may interact with the hood, pulling it over their head, and perceiving the coloured light and its

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changing colours. He or she might draw a relationship between their own activity and the activity of the performer in the video and the coloured objects used in the video and installed in the gallery. The viewer might read the instructions for interaction with the hood. These instructions will invite them to use only their consciousness to change the colour of the lights. If he or she continues to ponder the work, after considering all the elements separately, the viewer might stand back and endeavour to assess them as a whole to find an overall meaning.

This is the struggling and stumbling process of considering the work that plays out in the viewer’s mind. This is suggestive, too, of the cognitive “impasse” that Thomas Frentz proposes is necessary for both inventing and interpreting creative metaphors. Using Arnheim’s analysis, when the entirety of the Mind Lamp project is viewed as a whole “continuous field”, the viewer, through a compulsion to seek order and simplification, will engage in intuitive, high-order, non-linear thinking.38 In Stafford’s model, the viewer will stumble because of the confusion of disparate imagery and forms of presentation in the Mind Lamp project that do not accord with pre-formed understandings of the world. This has the capacity to provoke the viewer to question their current constructions of subjective and objective reality. 39 This is the kind of thinking that I wish to provoke in the viewer. When perceiving the Mind Lamp project, I do not want viewer to make the kind of linear connections of expectations that are grounded in the logic and empiricism of a conventional reality.

Metaphorical content The metaphor asserted by all three ‘mind works’ projects is conscious observation equates to physical matter; that is, conscious observation equals or results in words appearing on the screen, chosen coloured lights, or chosen colour of gobstopper. This is a creative metaphor that seeks, on the authority of quantum theory, to bring together the concept of consciousness with a concept with which is it not yet ordinarily associated (material objects). In this way, in the non-empiricist understandings of the metaphor discussed in Chapter 7, such associations may induce “alterations within a conceptual system or even a shift to a new system”.40

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In the experientialist understanding of the metaphor,41 the metaphorical content of the three ‘mind works’ projects operates to induce a new associative shift in thinking about consciousness and material objects. This recalls Wheeler’s view of a “participatory universe”, emphasising the role of the observer in creating observed phenomena.42 In addition, this metaphor concerning observation and material result has a coincidental resonance with the process of metaphorical association itself proposed by the experientialists. In that process, metaphors function in a dynamic relationship between subject and object, in a “pre- conceptual”, “pre-objective” realm, not only in the process of identifying and defining the concepts surrounding material objects but also to assist in the subject’s own continually dynamic construction of their understanding of themselves. 43 In this sense, the ‘mind works’ projects stand equally as a metaphor for Wheeler’s participatory universe and for the process and cognition of metaphor on the experientialist account. If the experientialist view is correct, this coincidental relationship could benefit the reception and cognition by the viewer of the metaphor that equates conscious observation with matter as it may have some deep resonance within the pre-objective being of the viewer.

Psychological model of metaphor Frentz’s psychological model, if correct, is helpful to indicate how the metaphor conscious observation equates to matter operates to create new knowledge in the mind of the viewer. The elements of the Mind Lamp project that provoke the struggling process seeking order and stumble points of confusion in the mind of the viewer that I identified earlier could equally cause the “impasse” identified by Frentz as a required condition. Where the impasse in the viewer’s consciousness continues, says Frentz, quantum processes take over to enfold and unfold the puzzling concepts into and out of the collective unconscious. It is this accessing of the collective unconscious that Frentz believes will provide new insight to the viewer. For my work, I anticipate this insight might assist the viewer in linking subjective observation with material result. The viewer who reported being “spooked to the core” after spending time with the Metaphase Typewriter revival project seems to have undergone a frightening shake-up of expected reality. In Frentz’s terms, she may have experienced an unnerving enfolding and unfolding process.

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Frentz’s psychological model invokes an appealing coincidence when used to understand a metaphor concerning quantum concepts: Frentz’s model itself incorporates Bohm’s quantum theory of a holistic universe where consciousness and matter are interrelated. The result may be an additional “ah ha” moment within the viewer’s mind when metaphorical content (conscious observation equates to physical matter) and process of understanding overlap. For Frentz, metaphors are similar to the Jungian concept of synchronistic experiences. The experience of the metaphor gives a heightened effect and insight is gained through the experience. My American friend’s connection and meditation with the Metaphase Typewriter revival project online, and my own unexpected experience with the device’s last output of words, may be indicative of this, but I can make no specific claim.

Isomorphic metaphoric structural correspondence An isomorphic metaphoric structural relationship, in the terms outlined by Arnheim, is also evident in all three ‘mind works’ projects. The form and structure of these works are as consciousness-interactive devices. Each provides quantum random events with which a viewer can interact. The viewer has the opportunity to engage directly and perceive material feedback in a variety of forms.44 On one level, they operate as experimental devices, enabling the viewer to test the conceptual basis of the work. The viewer asks, “if I use my conscious intention, can I change the colour of the light? Will Eric say the words I want him to say? Can I get the red gobstopper to drop out first?” The structure of the devices is isomorphic to the concept that conscious observation equates to matter.

With strong isomorphic structural resonance between form and concept, using Arnheim’s account, the ‘mind works’ projects facilitate non-linear cognition. The direct and immediate opportunity they offer for the viewer to engage with and test the conceptual basis first hand enables a viewer to think beyond the normal bounds of reality. Indeed, a willingness to engage with these works requires at least a small suspension of belief in conventional reality. In conventional reality, conscious intention and will play no part in affecting materiality.

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Consideration of materials In Chapter 8, I argued that even though quantum mechanical and theoretical concepts involve metaphysical pre-material states and consciousness, artworks about these concepts do not have to be ephemeral, or lacking in materials. For example, the large-format steel sculptures of Voss-Andreae (figure 6) and Antony Gormley (figure 18) rely on the connotations of materiality and solidity provided by metal to evoke the unexpected sense of immateriality. Similarly, my ‘mind works’ projects, rely on significant material components. They all contain the particular devices that produce the quantum random event (either Geiger counter and radioactive source or electron tunnelling device). They also require the formal structure to deliver the material outputs that result from viewer interaction (words and sentences as read by the computer laptop, interactive hood containing changing LED lights, and the gobstopper dispenser).

However, a gap — a metaphysical void — exists between the material components of the work that provide the random quantum events and the possible material output of the devices. 45 What cannot be represented materially in any of the works, and yet represents an essential element, is the viewer’s consciousness, their intention and will. By filling the void with their consciousness directed on each quantum event, the viewer may be able to affect or create the desired material output from the devices.

The Metaphase Typewriter revival project has a clean, sleek look to its form. The Geiger counter with its red flashing light indicates the recording of quantum events. It is housed in a silver painted box and on display under a clear Perspex cover. However, the unnecessary distraction of the laptop keyboard is obscured by a black Perspex cover. The cover also serves to reflect the green text arriving on the screen above. Minimising visual details focuses the viewer’s concentration between the quantum event and the output of words. It is the gap between the two that is the possible insertion point for the viewer’s consciousness.

In contrast to the Metaphase Typewriter revival project, the Mind dispenser deliberately reveals all its electronic and mechanical elements, including the hoppers of coloured gobstoppers, microprocessor, motor drivers, wire, optical

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detectors, connecting board, and plastic augers as well as the Geiger counter and small sheet of watch hands that act as the source of radioactive decay. In this work, I was motivated to provide a different interactive experience for the viewer. The viewer is invited to use their conscious observation, will and intention to send particular signals to the motor that drives the auger to advance coloured lolly of choice. I do not know how or if the viewer’s consciousness can make the device work, but to allow the mechanistic workings of the Mind dispenser to be seen might provide possible focus points for the concentrated effort on the viewer’s part.

The Mind Lamp project has a number of substantial material components that assist the viewer’s interaction with the work. As previously discussed, this work, more than the other two, operates conventionally as a fine art object with aesthetic considerations of form and display. Apart from this, the material elements are used as triggers to assist the viewer to understand and interact with the work. The viewer might make connections between the objects and take note of how some have been used by the performer in the video and the lenticular prints. In the video, the performer holds various objects and seems to be concentrating on them. The Mind Lamp behind her changes colours intermittently. The viewer’s connection of relationships between the objects, both physically present and represented, may enable them to question whether the performer is using their mind to change the colour of the lamp. This may be an entrée into suspending the viewer’s faith in conventional reality to interact with the hood.

The ‘mind works’ projects make a confronting assault on conventional reality. They propose that a primary role exists for the observer in obtaining information about the world and that the observer’s consciousness could be the agency by which fundamental particles move from states of superposition into material reality. The works do this, primarily, as devices where the viewer interacts with random quantum events to test this proposition. But they act equally as metaphorical devices, evoking the creative metaphor conscious observation equates to matter. Through the additional devices of provocation of unconventional thinking (particularly evidenced in the Mind Lamp project), considerations of materiality and structural isomorphic correspondence between

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formal elements and conceptual basis, I have argued that these works successfully enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality.

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1 For example: Eugene Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press [1961] 1983), 168; Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, “Orchestrated Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules: A Model for Consciousness,” Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, 40 (1996): 453–480; Amit Goswami, “Physics Within Nondual Consciousness,” Philosophy East & West, 51 no. 4 (2001): 535–44; John Archibald Wheeler, “Law Without Law,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement ed. John Archibald Wheeler & Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 182–213; Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: an Alternative to Materialism,” Zygon, 41, no. 3 (2006): 599–615, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9744.2005.00762.x; Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: II: The Libet and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Causal Anomalies,” Erkenntnis, 65 (2006): 117–42, doi: 10.1007/s10670-006-9017-y; John von Neumann, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, trans. Robert T. Beyer (Princeton: Princeton University Press [1932] 1955); Evan Harris Walker, The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge: Perseus, 2000); Eugene Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1967), 171–84; Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006). 2 In the Metaphase Typewriter revival project and in the Mind dispenser, quantum random events occur through events of decay of low-level radioactivity. In the Mind Lamp project events are provided through electron tunnelling. 3 I outlined John Archibald Wheeler’s idea of the “participatory universe” in Chapter 7. 4 No Singular Reality, a solo exhibition at the Webb Gallery, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, 2—14 April 2012. 5 David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture and the Quantum Revival (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011). 6 Corpus of Contemporary American English, http://www.americancorpus.org. 7 The original soundtrack for the video was composed by my musical collaborator Chris Bristow. 8 “The Psyleron Mind Lamp”, http://www.psyleron.com/lamp.aspx. 9 Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, “Scientific Study of Consciousness-Related Physical Phenomena,” http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/. 10 Psyleron Enterprises, “Ambient mind-matter interaction lamp,” accessed 25 September, 2013, http://www.mind-lamp.com/mind-lamp-research.php. 11 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper Torchbook [1958] 1962), 54—55. 12 For example: Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” 168; Hameroff, and Penrose, “Orchestrated Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain

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Microtubules: A Model for Consciousness”; Goswami, “Physics Within Nondual Consciousness”; Wheeler, “Law Without Law”; Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism”; Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: II”; von Neumann, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics; Walker, The Physics of Consciousness; Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections; Radin, Entangled Minds. 13 Jack Sarfatti, "Implications of meta-physics for Psychoenergetic Systems," Psychoenergetic Systems 1 (1974) cited in Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, 65; Walker, The Physics of Consciousness,; Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism”; Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: II”; Imants Barušs, “Quantum Mind: Conscious Intention in the Context of Quantum Mechanics,” Dydaktyka Literatury, 28 (2008): 31–40; Richard Bartlett, Matrix Energetics: The Science and Art of Transformation (New York: Atria Books, 2007). 14 Hameroff and Penrose, “Orchestrated Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules”. 15 Ibid., 456–57. 16 Laura K. McKemmish, Jeffrey R. Reimers, Ross H. McKenzie, Alan E. Mark and Noel S. Hush, “Penrose-Hameroff orchestrated objective-reduction proposal for human consciousness is not biologically feasible,” Physical Review 80 (2009): 021912-1—6. 17 Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, “Consciousness in the Universe: Neuroscience, Quantum Space-Time Geometry and Orch OR Theory,” Journal of Cosmology, 14 (2011), http://JournalofCosmology.com 18 Evan Harris Walker was a physicist at Ballistic Research Laboratories, United States Army, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. 19 Walker, The Physics of Consciousness, 178. 20 Electron tunneling is quantum process whereby electrons successfully cross negatively charged barriers, a feat not possible according to classical physics. 21 Walker, The Physics of Consciousness, 72. 22 Ibid., 263–64. 23 Ibid., 265. 24 Ibid., 266. 25 Ibid., 265-66. 26 Henry Stapp is a senior staff member of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 27 Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: An Alternative to Materialism,” 601. 28 Ibid., 604. 29 Ibid., 606. 30 Ibid., 607 and 614. 31 Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: II,” 139. 32 Henry Stapp, “Quantum Theory and the Role of Mind in Nature,” Foundations of Physics 31, no. 10 (October 2001): 1488. 33 Ibid. See also Jeffrey Schwartz, Henry Stapp and Mario Beauregard, “Quantum Physics in Neuroscience and Psychology: a Neurophysical Model of Mind–Brain Interaction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 360 (2005): 1309-1327 at 1325, doi:10.1098/rstb.2004.1598.

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34 Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, “A Modular Model of Mind/Matter Manifestations (M5),” Journal of Scientific Exploration 15, no. 3 (2001), 299 and 308. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 323. 37 Ibid., 311 and 323. 38 Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkley: University of California Press, 1969), 234. 39 Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1999), 117. 40 Mark Johnson, and Glenn Erickson, “Toward a New Theory of Metaphor,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 18, no. 3 (1980): 292. 41 Johnson and Erickson, “Toward a New Theory of Metaphor”; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (1980). 42 Wheeler, “Law without Law,” 184. 43 Johnson and Erickson, “Toward a New Theory of Metaphor,” 294. 44 The material forms of feedback in the Metaphase Typewriter revival project are the form of words and sound; in the Mind Lamp project, coloured lights; and in the Mind dispenser, the form of a coloured gobstopper. 45 The possible material outputs of the devices are intended words and sentences in the Metaphase Typewriter revival project; the willed-for colour of the light in the Mind Lamp project; or the chosen coloured gobstopper of the Mind dispenser.

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Conclusion

In this exegesis, I have examined how artists who engage with quantum concepts can enable viewers to doubt conventional reality. I have concluded that an artist has a variety of tools and strategies to do this. Artworks that propose that reality extends into the metaphysical realm or that reality may not be objective or entirely knowable or that suggest a role for consciousness in affecting or creating materiality will enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality. As I have argued, the first crucial step is that an artist must grasp the extra-ordinary nature of quantum mechanics. If they fail to do so, their artworks fail in their engagement with quantum concepts, and confuse the viewer. Further, I have argued that an artist, so engaging with quantum concepts, can enable the viewer to doubt conventional reality through their artwork’s capacity to provoke unconventional thinking and by the artist’s prudent considerations of materials and metaphor.

As I noted in Chapter 2, little agreement exists among philosophers and physical scientists on how to define the extent of reality. Reality may simply be composed entirely of physical matter, and metaphysical aspects, such as consciousness, may not exist at all. This is the materialist understanding of the world — that the only thing that exists is matter or energy. After the development of quantum mechanics and the beginnings of deliberations on quantum ontology, the materialist idea, although persisting today, began to be challenged by the new physics. In my discussions of the peculiar aspects of the quantum realm in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, I concluded that quantum mechanics contradicts the idea that only an objective physical, material reality exists and raises the possibility that consciousness, our thoughts and mind processes, are part of a broader reality unrecognised by conventional views. Moreover, quantum theory raises the possibility that consciousness, through observation and measurement, may somehow be involved in creating material reality.

Using the models proposed by Rudolf Arnheim and Barbara Maria Stafford, I argued in Chapter 6 that constructing artworks in a particular way might be able to provoke a kind of non-linear, unconventional thinking and resulting cognition in the viewer. Following the Arnheim perceptual model, the artist should

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consider complex combinations that nevertheless have ordering possibilities as well as make works that reflect their isomorphic metaphoric correspondence between their formal structure and the structure of their conceptual underpinnings. Following the Stafford model, a combinatorial method of blending non-coalescent images can cause a viewer to avoid limitations of linear thinking by stumbling, pausing and questioning their construction of the material world.

In Chapter 7, I argued that metaphorical correspondence for artworks can be found in the mathematical models and thought experiments that physicists and mathematicians have devised to explain abstract quantum concepts. In addition, the ‘intellectualist’ and ‘experientialist’ models of the ‘creative’ metaphor are helpful to the artist. These models accept that the metaphor can create new relationships and understandings without the need for an immediate literal equivalent. I also presented Frentz’s psychological model which can explain how a metaphor is created and interpreted in the mind of the artist and viewer respectively. While controversial, Frentz’s scheme has useful parallels for the artist engaged in quantum concepts. This is because Frentz evokes quantum processes themselves to explain the creative and interpretative process of the metaphor in the minds of the artist and viewer respectively.

As quantum mechanics suggests an imperceptible reality of pre-material states, I argued in Chapter 8 that artists need to be particularly attentive to materials they use when engaging with quantum concepts. The phenomenal features that can be experienced by a viewer through the low materiality of projection is particularly useful in enticing the viewer into a different reality of the artist’s making. However, as I have demonstrated, artists use materiality to their advantage, engaging with physical substances to suggest non-material and imperceptible concerns, such as space, concurrently occurring dual traits, branching, parallel universes, and entanglement effects.

Finally, I argued that the ‘mind works’ projects — the Metaphase Typewriter revival project, the Mind Lamp project and the Mind dispenser, discussed in detail in Chapter 9 — question the basis of conventional reality. More than any of my other artworks, they enable a viewer to doubt conventional reality. First,

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they evoke the creative metaphor that conscious observation equates to matter. More radically, as willing participants in these interactive works, viewers are obliged to test the extra-ordinary possibility that, by using conscious intention, they may affect material reality to deliver a willed-for result. The implications that these, and similar artworks, pose for traditional philosophical issues, such as solipsism, monism and metaphysical dualism, suggest avenues for further research.

Ultimately, the viewer may fall back on, or never alter, their conviction in conventional reality, but the artworks continue to exist as facilitators of doubt.

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Appendix

In Chapter 7, I indicated that the intellectualist and experientialist models of the metaphor are based on the concept that meaning and understanding is a dynamic process relative to and fashioned by the activity of the subject. However, this process results in collective conceptual paradigms created by the subjects themselves. Such conceptual systems have the capacity to change because of continued mental input by subjects. Metaphors can act to replace the dominant conceptual paradigm with new or altered concepts. This idea of a dynamic formations and alteration of dominant conceptual paradigms recalls Thomas Kuhn’s provocative claim that when paradigms of thinking change, it is possible that the physical world changes too. 1 Biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance” provides a controversial explanation of how both conceptual and physical paradigms are created, maintained and changed. Like Kuhn, he proposes a relationship between consciousness and matter. In this Appendix I will briefly outline Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance. Sheldrake’s theory also addresses the perplexing question that results from the discussion in Chapter 9 of the capacity of a viewer to interact with the ‘mind works’ projects: if our consciousness collapses quantum possibilities and everyone supposedly is capable of this, why do we experience an apparent single shared version of reality that we all (generally) seem to agree upon?

A shared reality In Chapter 2, I outlined the sceptical argument that proposes if all knowledge is gained through a subjective experience of perceived phenomena, the objective truth of anything cannot be proved beyond our senses. Carried to extreme, this is the basis for a solipsistic world. Such a world may be the case, but it is beyond proof. My experience seems to be one of a shared reality with other people. In Chapter 3, I discussed how the orthodox quantum theory is that superposition collapses by observation or measurement.2 I also discussed how mathematician John von Neumann, who formulated the current formalism of quantum mechanics, was among the first3 to link the observer’s perception of the results of an experiment and the collapse of quantum superposition as a way of explaining how and why quantum superposition collapses. 4 I also

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outlined in Chapter 3 how Eugene Wigner demonstrated through his thought experiment known as “Wigner’s friend”, that the observer of a quantum system collapses the system once and for all for all viewers. 5 In Chapter 9, I discussed Evan Harris Walker’s proposal that consciousness is linked to physical reality through the “will channel” of the brain. He proposed that quantum processes in the brain utilise the will channel of intention to affect material events.6 This channel, however, carries less data that the other channels and can be drowned out by the “noise” from the conscious channel of the mind. Therefore, there is far less opportunity to manifest intention, although this is still possible in his view.7 I also outlined in Chapter 9, Henry Stapp’s view that an intense, concentrated rapid sequencing of effort is required for conscious manifestation; not something everyone is capable of.8

However, if each of us is using consciousness all the time to interact with quantum states, why does everyone’s separate intention not manifest into a chaotic, unpredictable material mess? Our experience of reality seems to be that of a physically closed system: ordered, logically consistent and relatively stable. Unexpected ruptures in reality resulting from the expression of volition by other individuals do not seem to occur. Walker answered this puzzling question by suggesting that all observers are tied to each other and “these observers collectively select the reality that occurs”, thereby connecting conscious experience to material reality.9 This is done, he considered, through the “hidden variables of the mind” that link us together “as though we were one”. Even though each observer is to be treated as the observer who collapses the state of the quantum system, every observer is constrained to experience the same final state because “all observers share a fragment of their mind experience, nonlocally and nontemporally”. 10 Walker’s controversial view is based on his premise (contrary to how I have described conventional reality in this exegesis) that consciousness is a nonphysical but “real” aspect of reality.11

Sheldrake also proposes a controversial answer to why we all seem to experience the same consistent and relatively stable version of reality. In his view, the physical reality we experience is held in place by “morphic fields” of habit.12 If we are using consciousness to engage with physical reality, we might

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be doing so in accordance with the probable and habitual structure of the conventions of morphic fields that provide continuity.

Morphic fields Sheldrake’s radical idea developed from his study of morphogenetic fields in biology. These fields explain how plants grow from spores or seeds into the characteristic form of their species. Sheldrake points out that the naive approach is to say that morphogenesis is genetically programmed; that different species follow the instructions in their genes. But, he says, this explanation is not correct as all the cells of an organism contain the same genes yet different parts of an organism develop differently. Genes alone cannot account for form. Sheldrake says the idea of morphogenetic fields as “invisible blueprints that underlie the form of the growing organism” have been accepted by many biologists to explain why plants and animals develop different forms. 13 Sheldrake has extrapolated the self-organising metaphysical morphogenetic field systems to apply to organisms in social groups where “the morphic field” of organisation “gives each whole its characteristic properties, and interconnects and coordinates the constituent part”. 14 Morphic fields may be behavioral, mental, social and cultural fields all located within and around the systems they organise restricting or imposing “order on the inherent indeterminism of the systems under their influence”.15

The most controversial feature of Sheldrake’s hypothesis is that the structure and force of morphic fields are bolstered by repetition and memory causing structural patterns to become increasingly probable and habitual. Through repetition, the field becomes stronger. The same pattern becomes more likely to happen again. The more often patterns are repeated, the more probable they become. From this point of view, nature is essentially habitual.

The way in which information is transferred between similar systems is “morphic resonance”. This, says Sheldrake, involves the influence of like on like, the influence of patterns of activity on subsequent similar patterns of activity, an influence that passes through or across space and time from past to present. These influences do not to fall off with distance in space or time. The greater the degree of similarity, the greater the influence of morphic resonance.16

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Morphic resonance gives an inherent memory in fields at all levels of complexity. Sheldrake cites many examples where this can be seen in nature and in laboratory experiments on rats and other animals. “The best known involves a series of experiments in which subsequent generations of rats learned how to escape from a water maze. As time went on, rats in laboratories all over the world were able to do this quicker and quicker.”17 Sheldrake extends his idea of morphic fields into perceptual fields that link us to our environment and to each other. As the morphic fields are probabilistic but held together by repetition and memory, Sheldrake proposes that they can nevertheless be altered by a creative jump or a synthesis of new patterns, relationships and connections.18 Sheldrake and others (including prominent physicists John Bell, who devised Bell’s theorem that demonstrates that quantum mechanical predictions are inconsistent with local hidden variables and David Bohm, architect of the hidden variables theory) link quantum mechanics, consciousness and morphic fields.19

The possibility that the systems and patterns that we perceive to encompass reality are held together by morphic fields of habit leaves open the possibility that consciousness, through quantum processes, might be able to alter the morphic fields that we perceive as objective reality. Sheldrake says that the transfer of information through morphic fields could help provide an explanation for telepathy “which typically takes places between members of groups who share social or emotional bonds”.20

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1 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 134—35. 2 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper Torchbook, [1958] 1962), 54—55.

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3 The first being Fritz London and Edmond Bauer, “The Theory of Observation in Quantum Mechanics,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton: Princeton University Press [1939] 1983), 251. 4 John von Neumann, “‘Measurement and Reversibility’ and ‘The Measuring Process’” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, 554. 5 Wigner, however, was not the first to postulate the possible, critical role of consciousness in collapsing quantum wavefunction. Earlier, founding fathers of quantum mechanics in the 1930s such as Neils Bohr, Walter Heisenberg and John von Neuman, all pro-collapse theorists, considered the role of consciousness. 6 Evan Harris Walker, The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2000), 265. 7 Ibid., 265—66. 8 Henry Stapp, “Quantum Interactive Dualism: An Alternative to Materialism,” Zygon, 41, no. 3 (2006): 607 and 614, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9744.2005.00762.x 9 Walker, The Physics of Consciousness, 265. 10 Ibid., 274. 11 Ibid., 182—83. 12 Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past. Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (New York: Times Books, 1988). 13 Rupert Sheldrake, “Morphic Fields,” World Futures, 62 (2006): 31–41 at 32. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 33. 17 Ibid., 35 and Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past. 18 Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past, 321—22. 19 Rupert Sheldrake, “Morphic Fields and Morphic Resonance,” Noetic Now 4 (November 2010), http://noetic.org/noetic/issue-four-november-2010/morphic- fields-and-morphic-resonance/; David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake, “Morphogenetic Fields and the Implicate Order,” in Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life (2nd ed.) (London: Blond, 1985), 234; Imants Barušs, “Speculations about the Direct Effects of Intention on Physical Manifestations,” Journal of Cosmology 3 (2009): 590—99. 20 Rupert Sheldrake, “Morphic Resonance & Morphic Fields: Collective Memory & the Habits of Nature,” New Dawn 15 (3 March 2011), http://newdawnmagazine.com/articles/morphic-resonance-fields-collective- memory-the-habits-of-nature.

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