Sounding Qubits

FILE 2024 | Quantico
International Electronic Language Festival
Eduardo Reck Miranda – Sounding Qubits – Brazil

Although he has learned classical musical instruments since childhood, Eduardo Miranda’s favorite tool for composing is the computer. The researcher has been delving into artificial intelligence and innovative computing methods for compositing for some time, as they offer fresh insights and ideas beyond his own.

A quantum computer deals with information encoded as qubits. A qubit is to a quantum computer what a bit is to a digital one: a basic unit of information. In hardware, qubits exist in the subatomic world. They are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics.

Quantum computers are like super-powered versions of classical digital computers. While a digital computer processes data in a linear, step-by-step fashion, a quantum computer can explore many possibilities at once.

Operating a quantum computer requires different ways of thinking about encoding and processing information. This is where composers can benefit greatly. This technology is destined to facilitate the development of unprecedented ways of creating music.

Bio

Composer who works at the intersection of music, science and new technologies. His background as an artificial intelligence scientist and classical composer with early involvement in avant-garde pop music informs his distinctive music. He has composed for BBC Radio 3, BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC Singers and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He is a professor at the University of Plymouth and a research associate at Quantinuum, where he explores music composition with quantum computers.

Botanical Pavilion
To realize the ‘Botanical Pavilion’, Kengo Kuma worked alongside Geoff Nees — a melbourne-based artist and curator who has also worked on a number of architectural pavilions. Made in the japanese tradition of wooden architecture, where pieces interlock, held by tension and gravity, the structure at the NGV triennial features a tessellated interior lined with timber collected from trees felled or removed over several years at Melbourne’s royal botanic gardens. Some of the trees used within the architecture pre-date european settlement, while others signal the development of the gardens as a site of scientific research and botanical classification. Prioritizing natural phenomena over scientific order, the botanical species used are color-coded, rather than following any taxonomic order. this approach offers a statement by the designers against the reductive nature of science during the colonial era — a mindset at odds with many indigenous cultural beliefs and knowledge systems.

Appeel
»Appeel« is a game without rules. It starts with a wall that is covered all over with a signal red adhesive foil. The foil consists of thousands of circular stickers pre-cut in a narrow grid that wait to be pulled off and put in a new order by the visitors. The stickers, and its white negative on the wall, form, similarly to binary coded pixels, ornaments, news and pictures – on the original wall and far beyond: they move to adjoining rooms, onto faces and even leave the city.

Parasitic / Symbiotic
In the project “Parasitic / Symbiotic” this area of tension between nature and technology is addressed. A scenario is created in which the human being makes use of a technical device, that is sitting like a parasite on a tree. It contains a milling machine, which moves along a tree to carve encoded text into it. For the content of the carving a poem from romanticism („Abschied.“ von Joseph von Eichendorff) is used, which expresses the natural thoughts of unity and oneness and depicts the relation of nature and culture.

Jorinde Voigt is a contemporary German artist. Known for her coded drawing installations which resemble algorithms or sound waves, Voigt’s background in music and philosophical studies established her ongoing interest in probing scientific mapping processes. Throughout an inventive and playful drawing practice, her work visualizes thoughts and infinite spaces while examining the way in which information is represented visually.

Silent Barrage

Silent Barrage has a “biological brain” that telematically connects with its “body” in a way that is familiar to humans: the brain processes sense data that it receives, and then brain and body formulate expressions through movement and mark making. But this familiarity is hidden within a sophisticated conceptual and scientific framework that is gradually decoded by the viewer. The brain consists of a neural network of embryonic rat neurons, growing in a Petri dish in a lab in Atlanta, Georgia, which exhibits the uncontrolled activity of nerve tissue that is typical of cultured nerve cells. This neural network is connected to neural interfacing electrodes that write to and read from the neurons. The thirty-six robotic pole-shaped objects of the body, meanwhile, live in whatever exhibition space is their temporary home. They have sensors that detect the presence of viewers who come in. It is from this environment that data is transmitted over the Internet, to be read by the electrodes and thus to stimulate, train or calm parts of the brain, depending on which area of the neuronal net has been addressed.

TriangPaint

Holger Lippmann describes a part of his work as digital painting. What distinguishes digital painting from traditional painting on canvas or paper? We need to distinguish between two categories of digital painting. The first includes works created on the computer with ready-made graphic tools like virtual paint brushes or pens, in something like the way that non-digital pictures are created on paper or canvas. David Hockney’s painting of a sunflower on an i-pad is an example of this. The second category includes works using computer generation, in which programs coded by the artist continually produce new aesthetic concepts as images or animations. Every execution of the software creates new works within the pre-defined boundaries of the system. This process can be called generative painting.

move
File Festival
MOVE is an interactive installation divided into six distinct modules, JUMP, AVOID, CHASE, THROW, HIDE and COLLECT. Each module offers a single-user interaction, based on a verb corresponding to the action the participant is invited to perform. Each verb corresponds to a common procedure acted out by avatars during videogame play. Each module offers an interaction with abstracted shapes (circles, rectangles) behaving according to simplified rules of physics (collision, friction). Each module is color-coded with consistency, where the color red is used for the graphical element that poses the core challenge. Each module increases difficulty in a similar linear manner.What makes MOVE unusual is that unlike most computer vision or sensor based games like Eye-toy or Dance Dance Revolution, the participant IS the avatar, he is not seeing a representation of herself or an indirect result of her actions on a separate screen but instead interacts directly with the projected graphical constituents of the game. Because those graphical elements are non-representational they do not allow for a projection in a fictional space. The combination of abstracted shapes and direct interaction reinforces in the player the focus on the action itself (JUMP, AVOID, CHASE, THROW, HIDE or COLLECT) instead of an ulterior goal.

The Body, Color Coded in Kelvin Temperature According to Frequency
of Depiction

hardcoded memory

Джузеппе Рандаццо
transmutation
Transmutation#01 is a generative system composed of two interacting multicellular agents in a Voronoi spatial configuration. Each cell owns a color/saturation information. The cells interact with each other and with the other agent. The two agents are different. The circular one, the most active and in evolution, constantly tries to reorganize its shape and color structures, connecting similar colors in concentric formations. Moreover the saturation and shape of its colors aggregates are influenced by the duration and proximity of the interaction with the other pluricellular agent, whose motion is abstract and immutable. The metaphor at the heart of this system is a reference to the subject of the 2012 Gender Docufilm Festival in Rome, from which the video was commissioned, that precisely addresses the issues related to the the reengineering and the transmutation of the sexual, physical, mental identity, through the collision / confrontation with the external reality. Coded with Processing, rendered with 3Delight (via Processing). In collaboration with Filippo Ulivieri, music by Massimo Dolce.

drawing with robot arm
“With gene mapping, gender reassignment, prosthetic limbs and neural implants, what a body is and how a body operates becomes problematic. We generate Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh, extended operational systems and virtual task environments. Meat and metal mesh into unexpected and alternate anatomical architectures that perform remotely beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The monstrous is no longer the alien other. We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs that are amputated from a dead body can be reattached and reanimated on a living body. A face from a donor stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a Third Face. A skin cell from an impotent male can be recoded into a sperm cell. And more interestingly a skin cell from a female body might be recoded into a sperm cell. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing. In the near future you might rest you head on your loved one’s chest. They are warm to the touch, they are breathing, they are certainly alive. But they will have no heartbeat. A cadaver can be preserved forever through plastination whilst simultaneously a comatose body can be sustained indefinitely on a life-support system. Dead bodies need not decompose, near-dead bodies need not die. Most people will no longer die biological deaths. They will die when their life-support systems are switched off. The dead, the near-dead, the not-yet-born and the partially living exist simultaneously. And cryongenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. We live in an age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. Liminal spaces proliferate. Engineering organs, stem-cell growing them or by bio-printing will result in an abundence of organs. An excess of organs. Of organs awaiting bodies. Of Organs Without Bodies.” STELARC