Description
Book SynopsisAt the core of both art and science we find the twin forces of probability and uncertainty. However, these two worlds have been tenuously entangled for decades. On the one hand, artists continue to ask complex questions that align with a scientific fascination with new discoveries, and on the other hand, it is increasingly apparent that creativity and subjectivity inform science's objective processes and knowledge systems.
In order to draw parallels between art, science and culture, this publication will explore the ways that selected art works have contributed to a form of cultural pedagogy. It follows the integration of culture and science in artists' expressions to create meaningful experiences that expose the probabilities and uncertainties equally present in the world of science.
Trade Review'In 2014 the seminal “Nanoart: The Immateriality of Art” book was published, investigating the connections among artworks using physics at nanoscale to question our senses and the perception of ‘constructions’ in space. Paul Thomas has authored this new book, progressing his investigation in different directions. Quantum Art & Uncertainty allows his early interest about quantum theory to be fully articulated in his impact on how we understand reality, and how correlated artworks have conceptually expanded its revolutionary potential. The world of quanta is counter-intuitive and relies on mathematical probabilities, so it imposes since the beginning a new way of thinking, like in the classic challenging example of superposition (a particle being in two places at the same time). The imperceptible world of quantum and the invisibility of the elements inducing our perceptions are so close to the world of invisible presences behind the screens. If the underlying scenario is to relate to “probability and uncertainty”, understanding artists navigating “the visual unknown and the void” and we have to think “between human and non-human” then we can start to easily share Thomas’ intuition that the ’cloud’ is legitimised by quantum, immersing in his intriguing overall discourse about (as Thomas Morton defines it in the foreword) “the power of uncertainty.”'
-- Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural magazine, March 2019
'This stimulating book, whose powerful three page introduction by Timothy Morton is itself almost a reason to buy it, deals with the power of fragile uncertainty, the inbetween-ness of things, as exemplified in various artworks and in the speculative thought and art of Paul Thomas... Thomas's book is an insight into art as reflection of, and stimulus to think about, our flickering lives in a flickering universe, via art. Immateriality precludes neither performativeness nor political action... It helps that this book does not only describe the interactions between what we might call quantum awareness and art, but via Thomas's words and works also points to directions in which a rather new art might wend its uncertain way.'
-- Brian Reffin Smith, Leonardo Reviews, December 2018
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Foreword Between Nothingness and Eternity Timothy Morton
Introduction The Quantum Atmospherics of Consciousness
Chapter 1: The Swerve Agency of the swerve
Measurement and control
The Solvay rupture
Capturing reality
The unpredictable swerve
Counterfactual definiteness of art
Swerve speed
Quantum biology
Chapter 2: The Diagram Convergence
Diagram and the new language
The line
The flexible diagram
Entanglement and space
Multiverse
Multiverse and parallel worlds
Probability of facts
In aid of the diagram Photonic traces
Bergson’s diagram and quantum parallels
Bacon’s synergies
Chapter 3: Spin Quantum spin
The creativity of the spin
Quantum consciousness
Consciousness and the swerve
Chapter 4: The Graphene Moment
The genealogy of graphite
The haptic Atomic Force Microscope
Agency and mediums
The art of graphite
Drawing out
Performative agency
Chapter 5: Cloud The itinerant cloud
Shifting power of perspective
Pre-cloud conscious
Repositioning the cloud
The machinic whole
Engineer’s perspective
Conclusion Fragments References Author’s Biography Index
