QUANTUM BLUR

Blurring an image usually means losing detail - but not always. Imagine if you could encode a greyscale image into a pool of water, where the brightness of the image at a particular point was translated into the height of the water. If you were then to ‘let go’ and allow the water to behave naturally, the peaks would fall. If we converted the water height back into the image, this would begin to blur.

Originally an open source software born out of hackathons, Quantum Blur (QB) encodes a 2D digitalised landscape painting into quantum states, allowing manipulation by interference patterns using quantum operations. Extruded through QB original works become a topography instead of a flat image, a sort of new 3D artefact.

My work with QB finds form in prints, video and recently, VR and sculptural objects.

 

Curatorial perspective

Is this the first time that landscape painting can be perceived, not from an orthogonal, distant, perspective, but from its inside, in a broad sense? Since this immersive experience unequivocally challenges the Greenbergian flatness of the painting, could it be considered a form of virtual theatre in the terms of Fried? []

The questions, quagmires and paradoxes that Lipski encounters approaching these hybrid, digital- physical landscapes belong to a broader discussion that society is facing with the new technological status quo.

Curator and Academic Dr. López Paniagua