Quantum entanglement

Tyre tracks encounter each other and the road surface. 

I have posted before on lines and their entanglement and how nets can be used to think about interconnections. I have also posted on quantum theory and how this can be used to help us think about the fact that everything is constructed of different patterns of vibration or interconnected energy fields. By linking quantum theory to object orientated ontology, it could be argued that we can move towards a more 'flattened' or non hierarchical way of thinking about reality. If so, any event could be a drawing, but conversely the idea of defining something using a particular word becomes redundant. This is very counter intuitive and it is in opposition to all those theories that put human rationality on top of a pyramid of importance. One conceptual model that can be derived from a coupling of OOO with quantum theory, is one that could be used to think of a world without  'conditionality', something that would be quite disturbing if you are a Buddhist. Buddhists have a word 'pratityasamutpada' which means 'dependent origination', which suggests that because existence is dependent on previous or connecting factors, it is conditional on those factors. 

'He who sees the Principle of Conditionality  sees the Truth. One who sees the Truth sees the Buddha'.  See

The important issue here is that Buddhists and many other religions and philosophies look at the moment of now as being conditional on all the infinite number of things that have happened before. For instance I would not be here to write this if my mother had never met my father. But I would also not be writing this if mammalian evolution had not taken place in the way it did and a different set of creatures had filled that particular evolutionary niche left open after a meteor collision with the Earth served to extinguish most of the dinosaurs. 

I have previous looked at the Northern European concept of the Wyrd, one that is centred on an image of a thread that is wound around and between an individual and all the events and things and people that that individual encounters during their life span, a thread that is 'cut' on death. This image also suggests the interconnectedness of everything. Conditionality suggests that there is an underlying cause and effect for everything and that therefore one thing follows another. However in a universe where stones are no more or less important than Greta Garbo or a dandelion or this computer on which I'm typing, or a dog or a cushion or an idea, such as Batman, each entity is simply a particular configuration that happens to be in that configuration at one particular moment and which at any other moment might be part of something else. The interactions these things may or may not have will depend on their relative space time positioning and whether or not they affect each other will depend on their individual time and spatial properties. But what if some things can happen in two places at once or if time as we think of it, i. e. a situation whereby one thing follows another, is not the way things work, time being simply how we as a species have built an idea to help us navigate and understand our local space time experience. Conditionality has recently become even more questionable because it would appear as if there is no such thing as a single point in time to hold on to. 

More things interacting with stuff, visualised by other things interacting with stuff

If everything is more like a wave than a thing, then as waves occupy multiple places in space all at once, anything and everything can occupy multiple spaces at once. This is called "quantum superposition" and recently scientists have observed a molecule made up of 2,000 atoms occupy two places at the same time. We are now aware that bacteria are influenced by magnetic field changes at a quantum level and as our bodies are made up of approximately 50% bacteria, it is becoming apparent that we are, like everything else, interacting with quantum fields much more than we ever realised before. 

Because entangled particles remain connected in such a way that actions performed on one affect the other, even when separated by great distances, we can perhaps intuit other ways beyond the human to think about conditionality or cause and effect. The phenomenon "spooky action at a distance" depends on elemental particles or fields existing in all possible states simultaneously. Our previous mental picture of these things suggested that there was a boundary between the ordinary and the quantum world, but what if there isn't? If a molecule of 2,000 atoms is subject to quantum superposition there is no reason to expect that there's a limit to the size of quantum effects. It has recently been theorised that bacteria can become entangled with light particles and it has been seen that some birds can navigate the Earth by responding to bacteria that are themselves entangled with the Earth's magnetic field. All sorts of areas of thinking are affected by quantum entanglement. For instance; if our memories are simply patterns of chemical and/or electromagnetic connections, these patterns may, like those of the bacteria in our stomachs, become entangled with other electromagnetic fields. Our perceptions consist of recorded changes in chemical and/or electromagnetic connections, so at some base level, a memory, an idea and a perception all exist in a similar electrochemical format. Percepts, perceptions, sensations and reality all entangled together at a quantum level in ways previously unimaginable. 

A drawing made with graphite on paper, encounters computer software and because of the implications of the encounter, the idea is further adjusted to suggest imaginary encounters with a library of quantum effects

So where are we going with this? If I am a thing like any other thing consisting of a series of interacting fields that interact with other fields and I am interacting with stuff just like everything else is interacting with stuff, my drawings can be seen as the result of a certain type of material entanglement, and the materials I engage with, are at the same time engaging with me, neither being more or less important than the other. I am in effect the subject of my drawing materials' engagement, just as much as an idea I might have. It could be argued that I am an idea implied by the way certain materials are coming into new formations. 

This might not be as weird as it appears. It has been pointed out that quantum mechanical effects are key to the ability of green plants, through photosynthesis, to almost instantaneously transfer solar energy from molecules in light harvesting complexes, to molecules in electrochemical reaction centres. As photosynthesis is vital to our existence on this earth, I would suggest that we are entangled with this energy transfer at every level. When we eat food and release the energy tied up in plant and animal cells, are we not re-entangling the quantum mechanical effect of photosynthesis into ourselves and as far as the sun is concerned being just another localised twist in the entanglement of its long time energy release. 
As far as the sun is concerned we are in effect no different to the paper and the charcoal with which a drawing is made. You could well now argue that I was back using another version of 'conditionality', first of all the sun then the leaf etc. 

However in order for me to make sense of my nowness I need an idea such as conditionality in order to make decisions that suggest that what I do now will effect what is going to happen in the future. Conditionality enables me to navigate 'local' conditions, therefore I/we need it as an idea to remain sane.

I have referred to Graham Harman's diagram before when reflecting on Object Orientated Ontology, but it is worthwhile revisiting it in order to look at how quantum entanglement can be seen as part of the way we could think about the state of things as they are. 

Harman argues that in the day to day we deal not with real objects, but with their sensuous surrogates or manifestations. We fail to recognise the difference between real objects and sensuous objects because we live amongst a particularly localised set of entanglements where sensuous qualities have become associated with our particular sense organs' abilities, thereby rendering us blind to what is in reality hidden (to our sense organs that is) within objects. 

I think of this in a slightly different way. If I encounter a mountain, I can never actually experience it, I can only have a series of small encounters with the bits of the mountain I come into contact with. However from my tiny bit of information I can deduce all sorts of things that allow me to survive. For instance I may experience a certain coldness because of the mountain's height and may therefore respond to this by putting on warm clothes. So yes I don't ever encounter the 'reality' of the whole mountain because it consists of what feels like an infinity of possibilities, but I do respond to aspects of it, such as whether or not snow covers it. 

I try to open this issue out in another post on the limits of language and would argue that Harman is like so many other philosophers tied down with words and that his sensual object/real object distinction would disappear if he had no verbal or written language to refer back to. I would argue that we would simply interact with whatever is happening, the enactment on contact being some sort of exchange dependent on degree of touch and length of time tho two elements are entangled. 

Gravitational fields, electromagnetic fields, weak, and strong nuclear fields all mediate the four known fundamental forces. These fields interact by exchanging particles, which is their mediation or effect. 
This is how the four forces are described:

• Strong interaction: the interaction responsible for holding quarks together to form hadrons, and holding neutrons and also protons together to form atomic nuclei. The exchange particle that mediates this force is the gluon.
• Electromagnetic interaction: the familiar interaction that acts on electrically charged particles. The photon is the exchange particle for this force.
• Weak interaction: a short-range interaction responsible for some forms of  radioactivity, that acts on electrons, neutrinos, and quarks. It is mediated by the W and Z bosons.
• Gravitational interaction: a long-range attractive interaction that acts on all particles. The postulated exchange particle has been named the graviton.

If one existed, a unified field theory would bring these four interactions together into a single framework. (Carlo Rovelli suggests that we now have an answer to this in terms of information theory, but even so, he would argue that as new information comes into a system, part of the previous information becomes irrelevant). We might not be aware of them at our day to day human scale but they are what previously scientists took to be the reality that underpinned our existence. Now however we are told by scientists that this is only about 5% of 'reality' and the other 95% consists of dark matter and dark energy, things we can at the moment only guess at as to what they actually are. 

I am as an artist going to suggest that what is important here is the moment of 'exchange' between one thing and another. Whatever dark matter is it will have an infinity of possibilities, and it will be possible that some things will be able to respond to certain aspects of it, and how they respond will be the imaginative possibility of the situation. 

So how does all this impact on drawing? There is a book on architectural possibilities, 'Siteless: 1001 Building Forms' by François Blanciak. If you haven't come across it before do look it up, because it is a wonderful example of how visual thinking can be far more powerful than traditional linear, written or verbal thinking. The book is a response to the imaginative possibility of a series of situations.

As you can see from the images above, what Blanciak does is to provide us with what have been called by Ian Bogost, 'visual ontographs'. These are speculative encounters between possibilities of forms. They remind me of an exercise we used to set students on the Leeds foundation course, which was to explore how many variations of interacting basic forms you could draw. Blanciak's forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) from a constant and consistent viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. In many ways they reflect the flattening of hierarchy that I believe happens when a unified field theory is implied. No one thing is more important than another, but each encounter raises possibilities for future actions. (As new information comes into a system, part of the previous information becomes irrelevant). The fact that all of Blanciak's drawings are the same size reinforcing the fact that no one encounter is more important than another. 

This is interesting because it also points to a specifically aesthetic phenomena. In this case objects are not reduced to their sensuous manifestations, but are all speculative. The imaginative begins to occupy the same status as the real, both being types of encounters between things rather than being things in themselves. As I pointed out earlier, stones are no more or less important than Greta Garbo or a dandelion or this computer on which I'm typing. But in this case it is about an encounter with the qualities of Greta Garbo, the 'Garboing' or the 'dandelioning', the action rather than the object. My role in this being that of a bricoleur, someone who is making the most of what is at hand.

In my work for a recent 'Library Interventions' project I imagined that as I walked through the library I could be guided just as a bird could by some sort of quantum level interaction. All I had to do was leave myself open to its influence. A decision to stop and draw was an unquestioned instinctive one, one that could have been predicated by light bouncing off book titles and entering my field of vision and at some point getting entangled with some memory electrons. A type of speculative theory. 

My encounter with the bookshelves was diagrammed via an old drawing process that I used to use, centred on measurement and an awareness of my location in relation to the shelves I was looking at. (I'm reminded of this by Mike Croft's previous guest blog post, whereby he takes on the implications of this sort of perceptual drawing and pushes it to a particular limit). 

Initial observational drawing

The initial drawings were annotated with the names of specific texts that could be found along the central axis of vision. More drawings were then made from the ones made on location, this time allowing for 'speculative' encounters to be as important as encounters with sensuous objects. These speculative encounters were implied by book titles found. The drawings were then processed using computer software and a geometry of targeting applied to clarify the sighting process.

 

Aesthetic phenomena in this case allude to the domain of real objects beyond their qualitative manifestations in sensuous objects, this in effect freeing me from any form of being trapped in 'actualism' where objects are reduced to their sensuous manifestations. This is why making and drawing are much better ways of dealing with these issues, they leave the imagination to material inventions rather than ones predicated by words. My equivalent images to Blanciak's being ones where ceramic invention is linked to thoughts about library books as if they had organs for perceptual encounters, such as eyes, noses, ears, fingers and tongues. A book about Islamic pattern, may encounter one on cowboy boots, and as it does the imaginary taste of leather shapes a new formal logic. Initially images were simply about how things might emerge from rough lumps of clay, but as these images merged with possibilities coming from both drawings and clay shaping, new hybrids emerged. 

Drawings and ceramic objects made from the drawings

Once I began making these ideas changed again, my encounters with clay revealing something that was pushing back very forcefully and making its own demands as to what it should or could be. The drawings were about what pen and ink can become, not what clay can do. 

Objects made from an encounter with clay

From one position this object looks like a set of books, from another a pair of armoured knight's boots. This was an idea of the clay's rather than myself, I had set out to make a pair of cowboy boots thinking about books, but in the making process things changed. Clay, books, boots, ideas about the possibilities of what clay can look like, the word 'movement', the word 'time', all possible events within a wider range of events such as an exhibition, or a studio production, or an artist's work. As the clay began its own dialogue with my hands there was a point when I wasn't sure which of us was doing what. The same material dialogue, but perhaps to an even greater extent, then takes place during the glazing process. There is no way I can intervene in the kiln firing, I just have to trust that my intuition as to whether flow rate, eventual colour, surface texture etc. is right and that I have enough experience to predict the outcome. However the variables are so wide that there is always something that happens that I'm not expecting. As I have pointed out already, as new information comes into a system, part of the previous information becomes irrelevant. I. e. the traditional approach to art making or any form of planning or academic research, is to set out a question or set of issues to work with, that lead to a pre-determined set of procedures that you then can reflect upon as to whether or not the actions taken were successful or not. However working in this way things just happen. 

This not being in control is very important as it reminds me that other things have agency in this series of conversations. My interest in object orientated ontology leading me to foreground these issues and to hope that as I try and reduce my human centred awareness and acknowledge alternative non human realities, I can persuade others to try some other alternative modes of thinking. Our present systems of thought seem to have brought us into difficult and dangerous waters, so as an educator and artist it would appear to me that one of my roles is to point to other possibilities and suggest frameworks for thinking that might help someone come to terms with a world that seems to be out of kilter with the way we inhabit it. 

An illogical relationship

The fact that we don't know what 95% of the reality that we exist within consists of, suggests that our very limited perception of reality may well be very like the experience of a line in Abbot's 'Flatland'. A line could not conceive of a three dimensional solid, therefore if a line was picked up and moved through a space beyond the 2 dimensional world it existed in, it would in effect disappear and only reappear again if it was placed back into its own flat world. The three dimensional world would also allow for a view of where a line was to be seen as a series of positions that were possible points for reinserting that line back into its own space, therefore it could be reinserted at a point of previous existence, i. e. breaking the causality chain of time. For the line conditionality would therefore be questioned. 

A film has now been made of Flatland, and it is worth watching if you have never encountered Abbot's work before. The movement between 2 and 3D thinking is something fundamental to imaginative thinking and the position of drawing as a major game player in this process is vital. 

The artwork that relates to these ideas was exhibited in the Leeds Arts University gallery as part of the Library Interventions series of artist's responses to the university's library. 

See also:

Connecting the singularity 

Models as a process between 2 and 3D thinking 

Alien phenomenology 

Object orientated ontology 

Uncertain certainty 

Quantum theory and drawing
Mike Croft's post on the observation of perception
Drawing as entanglements of life


To read:
Abbott, E (1992) Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions New York: Dover

Bryant, R. L. (2011) The Democracy of Objects Michigan: Open Humanities Press

Capra, F. (1997) The Tao of Physics London: HarperCollins (I first read this book back in the 1970s and it influenced my work then, I have since revisited Capra's writings and find him still relevant)

Rovelli, C (2017) Reality is not what it seems London: Penguin