11 Feb 2026
Explorations of Uncertainty: Art in Superposition
Essayby Alexander Burenkov
Reality, once imagined as a stable, measurable system governed by causality and linear time, has become increasingly untenable as a cultural model. In the early decades of the 21st century—marked by algorithmic governance, planetary-scale computation, and accelerating epistemic crises—the quantum no longer belongs exclusively to the laboratory. It has emerged as a cultural condition. Developed by Angelique Spaninks (MU Hybrid Art House), Sabine Himmelsbach (HEK), and Monica Bello (Tabakalera), Explorations of Uncertainty: artists’ visions on quantum is currently on view at MU Hybrid Art House in Eindhoven. Earlier in 2025, it was shown at Tabakalera (Spain) before travelling to HEK (Basel). The exhibition positions itself at the threshold where quantum physics ceases to be metaphor and becomes an urgent framework for artistic thought.
The exhibition arrives at a decisive moment. Declared by the United Nations as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, 2025 has seen a proliferation of exhibitions, symposia, and artistic research projects engaging with quantum mechanics, quantum sensing, and quantum computing. From speculative visualizations of entanglement to data-driven installations responding to quantum noise, the past year has confirmed that quantum theory has become one of the most compelling epistemological resources for contemporary art. Even renowned artists like Laure Prouvost, who presented WE FELT A STAR DYING—a poetic video installation in constant motion at Kraftwerk Berlin last year, exploring perception and temporality through ephemeral, quantum-like fluctuations—have turned to the intricacies of quantum physics to challenge conventional narratives of time, causality, and materiality. Similarly, Pierre Huyghe’s recent project Liminals (also supported by the LAS Foundation, on view until March 8, 2026, at Halle am Berghain) interrogates the entanglement of organic systems and digital environments. Yet many projects of this kind remain illustrative, treating quantum concepts as aesthetic inspiration rather than as operative, material, or political forces.
Explorations of Uncertainty distinguishes itself by refusing simplification. Rather than explaining quantum physics, the exhibition investigates what it means for perception, agency, authorship, and responsibility when uncertainty, probability, and non-locality are treated as organizing principles of reality. As theoretical physicist and philosopher David Bohm famously suggested, the ability to perceive or think differently is often more consequential than the knowledge we acquire. In this spirit, the exhibition frames quantum theory not merely as a scientific model but as a worldview that destabilizes classical binaries—subject/object, cause/effect, presence/absence—that continue to structure much cultural production. While Einstein’s theory of relativity relativized space and time, quantum physics shattered the very notion of determinacy: at the quantum scale, reality is not a static entity but a dynamic process, unfolding conditionally and relationally.
In the foyer, before entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted by a video manifesto by Turkish artist and researcher Günseli Yalcinkaya, QULTURE, originally commissioned for the CIVA Festival 2025 (Moth Quantum). The work explores how the ideas of quantum theory and their technological applications are being absorbed into contemporary culture—through pop culture, New Age aesthetics, media, and even military infrastructures. Rather than attempting to visualize physics in a literal sense, it examines “quantum culture” as a cultural phenomenon, showing how quantum concepts such as uncertainty, superposition, and entanglement have already permeated the language, imagery, and myths of digital and visual culture, often unnoticed. This video essay weaves together philosophical, cultural, and technological layers to suggest a vision of superlogic emerging in the era of quantum narratives—a world in which the quantum has already begun to shape the very fabric of our reality.
The urgent logic of the wake-up call—Hello, World, the new reality is already here!—also characterizes Joan Heemskerk’s series of projects SAT‑HEX, Prototype, Hello, World!. Heemskerk, known as one half of the pioneering net.art duo JODI, employs digital protocols, code, and network architectures as artistic material, revealing the hidden mechanisms of our information environment and interrogating the structures of everyday digital life. Specifically, SAT‑HEX can be understood as a project in which quantum networks, cryptographic identifiers, and satellite infrastructures are transformed into artistic metaphors for future forms of communication and secure data transmission. According to published materials on the project, SAT‑HEX envisions a quantum network mediated by satellites, employing the principles of quantum cryptography for secure, ultra-long-range communication, including the use of lasers and diamond crystals as media for encoding quantum information. In experiential terms, the exhibition at MU is paradoxical, much like quantum reality: it does not illustrate quantum physics, but reproduces its logic experientially. It is not constructed as a linear narrative “from theory to illustration,” but functions as a field of coexisting states, where diverse artistic approaches do not explain one another, but exist in parallel. No single telos or final conclusion is connecting the works, and the viewer remains in a state of unresolved uncertainty—the meaning does not “collapse.”
The exhibition’s nonlinear ontology does not demonstrate quantum paradoxes per se, but rather immerses the viewer in a situation of paradoxical knowledge. Instead of a coherent narrative, the works form a quantum ensemble: multiple states coexist simultaneously, and meaning is actualized at the moment of observation. The exhibition’s quantum logic manifests not as strict epistemology, but as a curatorial heuristic. Many works resist fixed classification as either scientific experiment or artistic gesture, hovering between technology and metaphysics; this exemplifies the logic of superposition, in which the works exist in a state of “and/and” rather than “either/or.” What unites the participating artists, approach this condition from radically different positions, is not a shared aesthetic language, but a shared refusal of closure. Their works operate as open systems: visual, acoustic, computational, and conceptual environments in which meaning remains contingent, distributed, and unstable.
The logic of measurement is evident in the way meaning emerges not in advance, but through the viewer’s bodily, auditory, and temporal engagement—always incomplete and contextually contingent. The exhibition does not so much impart knowledge as model knowledge probabilistically. Its logic of irreducibility is clear in the conscious avoidance of a unifying meta-language: there is no single explanatory discourse, no final “translation” of art into science or vice versa. This mirrors quantum logic, in which a system cannot be reduced to the sum of its observable parameters. At the same time, the curators do not employ quantum theory as a rigid formal principle, as is sometimes done in post-conceptual projects. Rather, this is not a “quantum exhibition” in the strict formalist sense, but an exhibition that perceptually and ethically resonates with quantum thinking.
Several projects emerge from direct collaborations with quantum scientists or from experiments involving quantum computation itself. Alice Bucknell’s Small Void is a cooperative, two-player “call-and-response” game that interrogates the limits of language, attachment, and existential fragility, venturing into the cosmic and the intimate alike. Developed through the Collide residency programme in partnership with Arts at CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary, the game’s mechanics draw inspiration from the paradoxes of black holes and quantum entanglement, conceived through a sustained dialogue with theoretical physicists. Its worldbuilding is grounded in both the microscopic and the cosmic: from the alien yet familiar lichens under our feet to the recursive confusions of scale, presence, and life—oscillating between one and many, inside and outside, living and dead. Beyond its scientific and ecological imaginations, Small Void operates as a queer dating simulation, exploring the relational frictions and expansions that love, desire, and identity produce. The game stages moments of communicative breakdown alongside gestures of connection, framing the uncertainties of human—and nonhuman—attachment within the metaphoric language of quantum phenomena. In doing so, Bucknell situates her work at the intersection of play, philosophy, and speculative science, creating a space where procedural logic, emotional resonance, and cosmic speculation coexist. The resulting experience is simultaneously cerebral and affective: a delicate calibration of intimacy, alienness, and the sublime forces—both personal and cosmic—that shape relational worlds. Quantum here is not merely a theme but an active participant, introducing indeterminacy into artistic generation and interaction.
Among the exhibition’s visually arresting works is Elisa Storelli’s Perception Misconception (2025), which generates pulsating, flickering sequences of light points that seem to form fleeting words and images, evoking philosophical reflections on language, temporality, and perception. Storelli’s manipulation of light and rhythm creates a liminal space where comprehension and ambiguity coexist, prompting viewers to experience the instability and provisionality of meaning itself. Complementing this, Semiconductor’s audiovisual installation Parting the Waves (2017) transforms the abstractions of scientific research into an immersive, sensory environment. Drawing on data from particle accelerators and quantum field theory, the piece renders electromagnetic phenomena—such as the behavior of subatomic particles—as dynamic, flickering fields and undulating wave-like motions. By translating numerical and theoretical information into light, movement, and sound, Semiconductor illuminates the aesthetic dimension of scientific visualization, allowing audiences to encounter invisible structures of reality not merely as concepts but as perceptual and affective experiences. The work situates experimental physics within registers of spectacle and poetic resonance, bridging analytical rigor with sensorial immediacy.
Other works draw more loosely on quantum theory, using it as a philosophical lens to imagine non-binary subjectivities, porous temporalities, and post-human forms of agency. Among the exhibition’s most sensorially ambitious works is Annika Kappner’s Lonar Anat, part of her ongoing Deep Planetary Sensing series. In this project, Kappner invites participants to experience themselves as “particles” moving through interwoven layers of time, space, and quantum‑nano realities, foregrounding the entanglement of human and non-human, material and immaterial. Rooted in extended painting and multisensory scenography, the work probes the evolution of consciousness, the shifting boundaries of self and Other, and the ethics of perception. Through a hybrid deployment of landscape, installation, sound, scent, and somatic performance, Lonar Anat collapses distinctions between rational analysis and embodied experience, leaving viewers suspended in a state of expanded awareness that oscillates between the physical and the metaphysical. In doing so, Kappner situates her practice at the threshold of art and science, demonstrating how perceptual engagement can reveal alternative ontologies and the hidden architectures of experience.
One of the exhibition’s most compelling contributions lies in its engagement with quantum computing—not as technological spectacle, but as a profound critique of dominant computational logics. Classical computation, grounded in binary decision-making, has shaped everything from economic models to political governance. Quantum computation, by contrast, operates through qubits in superposition, holding multiple states simultaneously. This principle resonates with contemporary artistic practices that resist fixed categorization, linear narratives, and stable identities—from Ayoung Kim’s Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), a video reflecting on the hyper-acceleration of capitalism and the coexistence of multiple realities, to Marina Otero Verzier and Manuel Correa’s Building for Quantum (2025), a research-based documentation of Spain’s first quantum computer facility. Together, these works underscore how quantum concepts inspire new modes of artistic thinking and perception, revealing the entanglement of technology, experience, and imagination.
In Explorations of Uncertainty, quantum computing becomes a conceptual ally for artistic strategies that embrace ambiguity, multiplicity, and partial knowledge. The exhibition asks what kinds of culture, ethics, and institutions emerge when non-binary computation ceases to be speculative and becomes infrastructural. At a moment when quantum technologies are rapidly moving from research labs into military, corporate, and governmental systems, this is not an abstract question. The artists insist that quantum futures cannot be left solely to engineers and policymakers; artistic engagement functions as anticipatory critique, intervening before these technologies sediment into opaque systems of power. One of the most famous artists working with critical exploration of quantum computing: Libby Heaney, Nibble My Multiverse (2025), a generative, immersive project that extends her long‑standing exploration of quantum multiverses, non‑binary logic, and layered realities.
The piece presents dual “quantum multiverse” environments—animated through game‑engine software (via Unity) and evolving as an 11‑minute loop with a live webcam feed and stereo sound—where multiple versions of possible realities unfold simultaneously and interactively. These multiverses are visually and conceptually layered, collapsing conventional boundaries between observer and system and inviting participants to experience the indeterminacy, superposition, and coexistence of parallel states of being in real time. Heaney’s practice consistently bridges quantum physics, queer theory, and digital culture, and Nibble My Multiverse exemplifies this hybridity by making abstract scientific ideas—such as the plurality of possible outcomes and the relational nature of observation—visceral and perceptual rather than merely conceptual. The integration of live webcam feedback destabilizes fixed subject positions and reflects Heaney’s interest in how identity, environment, and technology entangle within speculative multiversal frameworks.
What distinguishes the exhibition from other quantum-themed shows is its curatorial rigor. It avoids both technological fetishism and didactic simplification, treating uncertainty itself as a method. The works operate relationally, interfering with one another like entangled quantum states, and implicate viewers in navigating incomplete information, delayed causality, and competing interpretations. Here, quantum physics is not represented—it is performed. Knowledge is provisional, agency is distributed, and meaning emerges through interaction rather than mastery. By translating quantum principles into sensory and critical experience without flattening their complexity, Explorations of Uncertainty offers a rare lesson: not answers, but a training in uncertainty. In an era when cultural, political, and technological systems increasingly demand premature certainty, this may be its most radical gesture. As Niels Bohr once observed, “If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.”
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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