Why quantum physics, and not AI, is the protagonist of art today

Quantum physics is no longer confined to laboratories and scientific papers. In recent years, it has entered contemporary art with growing force, through immersive exhibitions, installations, and research programs that bring artists and scientists into the same working space. The institutional calendar has reinforced this momentum as well: under UNESCO’s leadership, the UN declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. A theory originally developed to describe the behavior of atoms and particles has thus become one of the most unexpected points of reference in the international art world. How did that happen?

Tommaso Calarco

For theoretical physicist Tommaso Calarco, however, the question should be framed differently: “How come all the great scientific revolutions—Darwin’s theory, the Copernican revolution, Newtonian mechanics, Einstein’s relativity—have had such a strong cultural impact, while quantum mechanics apparently has not?”

Calarco, who works between the University of Cologne and the University of Bologna and has long been involved in projects at the intersection of scientific research and artistic practice, notes that quantum mechanics describes phenomena that elude our intuition—superposed states, probabilities, events that seem to occur without a determinable cause. That is precisely why, unlike other major scientific revolutions, it has been difficult to turn it into a shared worldview. For a long time, he says, the answer seemed simple: “I thought it would never happen, precisely because of this dimension of inherent elusiveness.” In recent years, however, that conclusion has shifted: “I’m beginning to think that that ‘never’ was simply a ‘not yet.’”

One of the first artistic projects Tommaso Calarco collaborated on was with Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, a duo known for a practice situated between installation, performance, and experimental science. “It all grew out of a European initiative that paired artists with scientific research projects,” he recalls. “In this case, the artists were interested in working with an atom trap.”

The device is almost elementary: a small glass chamber in which individual atoms are trapped and illuminated by a laser. After a few moments, they become visible. “The little atom turns on and off. It glows completely randomly,” Calarco says. “Not because information is missing—it is intrinsically random.” More precisely, it is one of the few phenomena we can observe directly without a determinable cause.

To explain the result, Calarco turns to an image from the art world: The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramović’s 2010 performance at MoMA, when long lines of visitors waited for their turn to sit in front of the artist. In this case, the fascination of direct contact with the artist’s presence is replaced by one of the most enigmatic phenomena in physics: “I find it to be something similar. Only instead of sitting in front of a person, we sit in front of a single atom.”

Today these collaborations are possible not only because of artists’ curiosity, but because a genuine ecosystem of foundations, research programs, and artistic commissions is taking shape around this dialogue. One of the most active players in this landscape is LAS Art Foundation, a Berlin-based nonprofit that in recent years has fostered public works and programs by bringing together artists, scientists, and emerging technologies. LAS operates through thematic cycles that combine art commissions, public programs, and educational activities. Between 2022 and 2024, for example, its Interspecies Future cycle explored the relationship between planetary-scale technologies and nonhuman life. In that context, the foundation commissioned Pollinator Pathmaker by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, an algorithm developed with botanists and pollination experts to design gardens capable of supporting the widest possible variety of pollinators—not only bees, but also butterflies, hoverflies, and beetles.

Carly Whitefield

Since 2025, the program has turned to quantum physics with the Sensing Quantum cycle, which combines artistic commissions—from Laure Prouvost to Pierre Huyghe—with symposia, workshops, and educational activities. Carly Whitefield, the foundation’s Program Officer, explains the reasoning behind this approach: “I believe deeply in what can happen when you bring artists into science and technology, and then also bring audiences into that experience.” In the case of quantum physics, she adds, the challenge is even more delicate: “It’s one of the most complex and intangible areas of scientific research. That’s why it’s important to work through sensory experiences that can engage the viewer.”

The truth is that, in an age dominated by algorithms, predictive models, and artificial intelligence systems that promise to anticipate every aspect of human behavior, quantum physics reintroduces a more radical doubt: that the world may not be entirely determinable. And it is perhaps precisely this friction that attracts so many artists. French artist Laure Prouvost, for example, developed immersive environments for the exhibition We Felt a Star Dying (2025), in which images, sounds, and smells come together to create a kind of sensory experience of the quantum.

In the work of Hito Steyerl—an artist and filmmaker among the most influential figures in contemporary art—quantum logic becomes, instead, a narrative structure. In the film-installation The Island (2026), presented at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, different levels of reality—historical, technological, and imaginary—interweave without collapsing into a single interpretation.

Pierre Huyghe

Some artists engage with the perceptual dimension of the quantum, translating abstract concepts into sensory experiences; others explore its narrative implications, constructing works in which multiple possibilities coexist simultaneously. In still other cases, the dialogue moves directly into the infrastructure of scientific research. This is the case with the French artist Pierre Huyghe, who for Liminals (2025), his latest exhibition at Halle am Berghain, worked directly with data from a quantum computer. Developed through exchanges with scientists and researchers, the project transforms the vibrations of a grid of atoms into a sound simulation, as if the machine itself were becoming a musical instrument.

Quantum logic can also become a structuring principle in theater. Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski, known for productions that weave together live cinema, installation, and dramaturgy, has built Quanta as a story that unfolds through detours and alternative possibilities. The narrative does not proceed linearly, but continuously opens into variations that the audience is asked to hold together.

This way of constructing narratives is not entirely new to art. Structures made up of overlapping and interwoven layers have long run through the history of cinema and, even earlier, the novel. Stepping back further, some scholars have identified affinities with early twentieth-century artistic practices, particularly Surrealism. Whitefield says she had never thought of this genealogy until she read the studies of art historian Gavin Parkinson: “Instinctively I would have expected artists closer to technology, like those of the Bauhaus. But it actually makes sense that it was the Surrealists. They were fighting against the idea of a completely determined world with their art.”

Think of the game of cadavre exquis, in which several people construct a sentence or a drawing by adding fragments without seeing the whole. Or of automatic writing, through which the Surrealists sought to bring out unexpected associations without the rational control of the author. Or again of Max Ernst’s collages, born from the juxtaposition of images drawn from different contexts to generate new visual narratives. In all these cases, reality no longer appears as a stable system, but as something that bifurcates, multiplies, and transforms according to the conditions under which it is observed. “There is something liberating about this,” Whitefield observes. “In today’s world, it’s important to allow ourselves to think about multiple realities.”

The next project in this direction will be The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs by Natasha Tontey (6 may - 25 october 2026) , a new commission by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex, which will be presented at the Ateneo Veneto during the 61st Venice Biennale.