Last week, I had the pleasure to participate as a speaker to the workshop “Entangled Visions: Exploring Quantum Visualizations in Culture, Dissemination, and the Arts” organised by the Quantum Hub at Oslo Metropolitan University.

In my talk, titled Visualising the Quantum Ecology: Sensing across Sights, Imaginations, and Design, I started from the book Quantum Ecology to present some ideas I have been developing recently on sensing as a trans-ecology articulated across dispositif-dependent modes of experiences. Far from being only theoretical, these ideas can find concrete applications, for instance in transdisciplinary teaching, phenomenological studies on AI, and non-normative approaches to value and policymaking.

My big thanks goes to the organisers of the event – as well as to all the international participants – for setting up a truly interdisciplinary space where a highly diverse top-class group of scholars, researchers, artists, scientists, and curators could get together and generate brilliant discussions around quantum physics’ hard-to-pin down “meaning” (rigorously in quotation marks) and the effects of emerging quantum information technologies across disciplines and fields, especially the arts.

Below the abstract of my presentation (here the slides).

This talk weaves together cognition, perception, and expression to explore
quantum-inspired and quantum-derived links across sights, imaginations, and visualizations. I will do so by discussing the “quantum ecology” as an onto-epistemological framework and a technological paradigm. Both the framework and the paradigm pivot around an understanding of being as sensing: this latter is not a faculty applied to a pre-given world, but the ongoing modulation of the I-world coevolution. In other words (and more radically), being is technics: an embodied, emergent information symmetry breaking that is always from within and open-ended, enacting complementary auto/sympoietic dynamics.

I begin with contrasting sight as a technologically prosthetic mode of experience and imagination as a discontinuous, insight-driven mode of experience. These two modes of actualizing reality (i.e., “world-sensing”) are always copresent, yet partially incommensurable, and resist any framing, which is rather an ex-post analytical operation.

From here, the talk examines how different world-sensing ecologies emerge as/through embodied being as technics: language (and writing systems) stabilize meaning as a form of shared phenomenological sensing of sensing; mathematics, as a signification system, also operates as a sensing of sensing, by abstracting from perceptual experience in favor of a cognitive apprehension of reality; digital computation formats the sensible into binary logic, eschewing (anthropological) meaning altogether; and quantum information technologies as dispositif introduce new forms of probabilistic synthetic sensing, exposing and refracting entanglement, uncertainty, and non-locality into the societal fabric.

Most importantly, these ecologies do not form discrete domains but co-emerge through continual tension, alignment, and differentiation. Put differently, I advance the idea that ecologies can be best understood as fractal holograms: nested onto-epistemological world-sensing whose intermingling become thinkable and designable through/as always-partial, open-ended onto-epistemological configurations. So how to visualize ecologies as fractal holograms to yield new insights into reality as an emergent affair?

The talk discusses how some of these tenets can be applied in practice.
Notably, I present the design and teaching of a course – “Ethics for the Data-Driven City” (TU Delft 2022-2024) – based on an original “problem-opening” approach that leverages and operationalizes quantum ecology’s emphasis on uncertainty and entanglement to reveal the value-laden irreducibility of data practices and to design artefacts that expose the inevitable ethical tensions and uncertain (un/intended) consequences emerging from the computation of cities as complex systems.