Thank God Science Is Queer Now

Entering the black cube at Berlin’s Schering Stiftung in early 2022, I want to believe. Libby Heaney’s Ent-, the inaugural commission of LAS Art Foundation’s Sensing Quantum program, promises quantum computing as art, Hieronymus Bosch reimagined through superposition, reality revealed as fluid. In the darkness, hybrid creatures float and reform. Heaney has a PhD in quantum physics and is among the few artists working with actual quantum computers rather than merely borrowing quantum vocabulary as metaphor, and this fact hovers in the room like a credential one is meant to inhale. As LAS frames it, Ent- critiques quantum mechanics’ role in “accelerating surveillance capitalism” while celebrating its potential to “break down binary thinking.”1 This packaging offers everything: critical of the technology, comfortable with the ontology. Physics, here rebranded as queer and relational, can be trusted again. What a bargain.

This packaging brings together the various elements of what has (almost) become a genre: quantum-inspired art that is technically accomplished, politically engaged, and theoretically informed by new materialist philosophies. Often slickly designed, it makes quantum mechanics’ formal concepts like superposition, entanglement, and indeterminacy available for artistic appropriation. In doing so, it critiques extractive and violent applications of quantum technology (e.g., surveillance capitalism) while celebrating quantum mechanics’ apparent dissolution of binary categories. In so doing, it incorporates all the good stuff available from left-leaning academia: fluidity, plurality, queerness, liminality. Quantum art now operates at an institutional scale across continents, with dedicated funding streams, scientific collaborations, and a growing critical discourse. Examples include Liverpool’s Quantum Real series, LAS Foundation’s multiyear Sensing Quantum art and research program in Berlin,2 commissions by the Leeum Museum and the Tate Modern, artists with physics PhDs (Heaney, Voss-Andreae), and corporate partnerships with Google and Anthropic. Standing in the gallery, the fusion of critique-and-celebration, political engagement, and metaphysical speculation, all delivered at an institutional scale, felt too neat. Something had shifted in how art relates to physics, and the shift had arrived so smoothly and so wrapped in progressive language that I almost missed it. When had this happened, and at what cost?

We Felt a Relation Shifting

To see what’s changed over the last thirty years, it helps to remember what came before. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, classical Newtonian mechanics was branded by critical theorists as the exemplary villain of Western epistemology: Its deterministic laws and clean subject-object separation underwrote a mechanistic worldview that reduced nature to calculable matter and, in the more ambitious tellings, legitimated colonial extraction as resource management.3 Newtonian physics stood in for a whole epistemic style—one that travelled well beyond physics proper, into medicine, anthropology, criminology, and social sciences. Fueled by the lingo of the new Science Studies, artists engaged this critique materially. Mona Hatoum’s Foreign Body (1994) turned the medical endoscope back on itself, exposing the gaze that promises transparent access to the interior as itself invasive, voyeuristic, and productive of what it claims merely to reveal; Nancy Burson demonstrated how measurement technologies constructed rather than recorded racial categories; Mark Dion staged archaeological methods as practices rather than transparent fact-recovery.4 Projects like these interrogated, reimagined, and frustrated the ontologies of scientific transparency.

Yet something was missing, or so the story went. Capital-T Theory, the charge ran, had wrongly reduced questions about reality itself (ontology) to questions about human knowledge and representation (epistemology)—and this reduction was cast as its cardinal sin.5 Narrated as the failure of postmodernism (may we ever know what that much-maligned signifier means), there emerged, across the arts and humanities, a mounting dissatisfaction with what came to be characterized as epistemology’s overreach. If everything is socially constructed, if all knowledge is situated and perspectival, if reality is always mediated by discourse, then doesn’t this make humans the center of everything? Doesn’t this render the world infinitely malleable, as if nature itself waited patiently for human interpretation to bring it into being? The charge, levied most forcefully by the emerging new materialisms, was anthropocentrism: Theory had put the human at the center of a world it claimed to decenter. Poststructuralism had trapped readers in language games while planetary crises demanded engagement with matter itself, with real material forces indifferent to human representation or interpretation. And so, ontology was called back into action. This rallying cry echoed through theory conferences and artist statements alike.6 Matter was recruited to discipline meaning.

This return to ontology was operationalized by a return to science. Engagement with quantum mechanics offered a fitting form to do so. With its apparent dissolution of subject-object boundaries and its challenge to classical determinism, quantum mechanics was no longer the discipline Science Studies had taught us to suspect, yet it remained a way of engaging materiality without the binary, mechanistic frame. It promised to thread the needle between rejecting science altogether and embracing a science that smuggled the old dualisms back in.

The discourse surrounding Laure Prouvost’s We Felt a Star Dying (2025) speaks of this shift and shows how quantum art has embraced a particular mode of engagement with physics. Staged across 3,500 square meters of Kraftwerk Berlin and developed over two years with researchers at Google Quantum AI, the work uses data from a quantum processor to generate a darkened sensorium of video, sound, scent, and floating sculptural creatures, all organized around the question: How might we sense reality from a quantum perspective? Critical reception consistently emphasized the spectator’s sensation over cognition, affect over analysis. Günseli Yalcinkaya notes that the work’s “emphasis on feeling first, as opposed to thinking” functions as “a crucial linguistic slip to avoid describing to audiences what quantum actually is”—a necessary evasion given that, as she observes, “not even scientists know the answer.”7 Yet Yalcinkaya’s own analysis is slippery: After acknowledging this fundamental epistemic uncertainty, she confidently writes that “quantum theory interprets the world as a net of relations: both human and nonhuman (animals, plants, minerals, objects).” She moves from quantum mechanics as mathematical formalism towards the reality that this theory presupposes. The acknowledgement of disagreement pays lip service to the interpretive plurality of quantum’s formalism while the analysis proceeds as if such plurality has been adequately addressed. This acknowledgment of uncertainty seems to satisfy the demand for epistemic humility, allowing the discourse to proceed to ontological claims as if the interpretive work has already been done.

Laure Prouvost, We Felt a Star Dying, 2025. Installation view at Kraftwerk Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by OGR Torino. © 2025 Laure Prouvost. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025.

Prouvost’s installation literalizes quantum concepts through direct bodily experience: Visitors lie on heat-reactive surfaces, move through sound corridors that fluctuate with their presence, pull meteor-like sculptures over their heads as oversized helmets. Senior curator Carly Whitfield describes the video as “fluid, rhythms in and out of sync,” explaining how random images interspersed at random moments allow visitors to feel how, at the smallest scale, “everything follows quantum rules.” Prouvost insists that “in everything is quantumness, it is in the air … It’s everywhere, it’s a big subject.”8 The work never quite states that quantum’s ontology is relational, but the suggestion is everywhere: a world that is “ephemeral and constantly shifting,”9 where one is invited to “feel the shift into quantum thinking.”10 Qubits become “cute bits”; computational noise becomes cosmic interconnection; the formalism dissolves into mood. Don’t worry about the complicated stuff, the installation seems to murmur—trust the vibe, it’s all fluid now. This is vibe-based pedagogy: helping audiences vibe with quantum, to feel it somehow.

While the work claims that fundamental (i.e., ultra-small) reality is quantum, it never specifies whether and how this claim travels to the experiential register where the audience lies on heat-reactive surfaces and feels the warmth. The slippage between scales (between the quantum level and the human level) is left unaddressed, which means it is also left unargued. The affective register does the work that the otherwise absent argument would. There is nothing wrong with speculating about what quantum mechanics means. However, speculation that never marks itself as speculation reaches the audience as something firmer. What visitors take with them is the impression of a fluid, relational, indeterminate reality. The choices that would make the speculation legible are smoothed over at every link in the chain: by the work that gestures without claiming, artist statements that suggest without committing, curatorial framings that translate suggestion into ontology, and critical reception that receives the ontology as given. Lying on the heat-reactive surface, I waited to feel quantum. The warmth was there, but whether it was quantum remained unclear.

The discourse around We Felt a Star Dying, Refik Anadol’s Quantum Memories at the NGV (also developed with Google Quantum AI), and much of the broader field of institutionally commissioned quantum art distributes its critical attention unevenly: rigorous about how quantum and its technologies are developed, funded, and deployed; less probing of how quantum’s claims are validated and interpreted in the first place. This maps, roughly, onto the philosophy-of-science distinction between the context of discovery (how scientific claims are produced) and the context of justification (how they are validated as knowledge). In quantum art, we might say, there is critical engagement with the former and uncritical engagement with the latter. The distinction between these contexts is not hermetic. Feminist philosophy of science has long shown how social and political factors shape what counts as evidence, which questions get asked, and which theoretical frameworks gain authority.11 But this porousness makes the asymmetry in quantum art’s critique more striking, not less. These works variously politicize who uses quantum technologies and for what purposes, interrogate the military-industrial apparatus funding quantum research, and challenge the corporate control of quantum computing. Yet, because justification practices are themselves socially embedded, the failure to examine how quantum mechanics produces and authorizes its knowledge claims becomes more consequential. Which interpretation of quantum mechanics is being invoked? What material practices and institutional arrangements validate quantum claims? What gets excluded when a specific interpretation of quantum’s formalism is treated as transparent access to reality? The authority of quantum mechanics as a neutral descriptor of our fundamental reality remains intact, providing the ontological ground upon which political and aesthetic interventions are staged.

The shift is telling. Classical physics invited critique because its ontology (deterministic, mechanistic, reductionist) was mapped onto political projects that artists generally opposed. Meanwhile, quantum mechanics, as interpreted by much quantum art, appears different. The discourse’s reading of its ontology (indeterminate, relational, nonbinary, queer) seems to align with progressive commitments. And so, now that physics is “queer,” it seems that we can invoke its authority again. But this apparent alignment (between science and commitments to transformative social change) is precisely where critique becomes urgent. The assumption that quantum mechanics carries inherently progressive ontological content reproduces the very same naturalizing gesture that earlier critical traditions taught us to question. What emerges is more atmospheric than argumentative—a cosmology of convenience in which reality is suggested to already embody the values we hold, without anyone having to demonstrate the entailment. Science appears not as a site of contestation but as ambient confirmation: The universe was progressive all along, the suggestion runs, and we just needed the right formalism to feel it. The radicalism is entirely ontological, which is to say it demands nothing from us. This forecloses the messy work of interpretation and some of the labor of political organizing.

The queer new world quantum seems to inaugurate gains persuasive force through reliance on technological marvels. Across the genre, the working hardware is staged as the source of wonder—and reviews of We Felt A Star Dying are exemplary. They consistently foreground Prouvost’s “rare access to a quantum computer,”12 her unprecedented collaboration with Google Quantum AI, the fact that she worked with actual quantum hardware rather than simulations.13 Bettina Kames, LAS Art Foundation’s CEO, wrote a piece for Art Newspaper that opens by describing her visit to “the coldest place in the universe”—the quantum processor at Google’s lab, “a suspended tangle of wires and metal plates” running at temperatures “cooler than deep space.”14 This framing recalls early cinema’s exhibition practices, when the projection apparatus itself was placed within the theater as an object of wonder, when audiences marveled at the technology that produced moving images as much as at the images themselves.15 The quantum computer becomes spectacular in both senses: visually impressive and worthy of spectacle. The work leverages spectators’ collective curiosity about quantum computing (the promises of revolutionary computational power, its mind-boggling workings, the fears of encryption-breaking surveillance capabilities, the geopolitical competition between China, the EU, and the US) while staging the artist’s access to this contested technology and its rarely seen researchers as itself a form of cultural capital.

Meeting the Universe Where It’s At

Karen Barad is the art world’s theorist of choice for this move from epistemology to ontology. Their writing hums as constant background music in these expositions: Meeting the Universe Halfway appears in the bibliography of “Quantum Real” and their concept of entanglement underwrites exhibition statements and e-flux announcements alike. The appeal is understandable: Barad offers a way to take science seriously without reinstating a naive realism, to engage with matter without abandoning political commitment. Reading Barad in graduate school felt like being given permission to love physics again without abandoning critique. But where Barad offers to meet the universe halfway—in the space where apparatus and phenomenon mutually constitute each other—the art world’s invocations of their theory want to meet it all the way, to arrive at reality as such, at the quantum Ding an sich finally freed from Kantian and feminist caution.

The overextension begins with genre confusion. Barad’s work operates (explicitly) performatively rather than representationally. As they write, “Theories are not mere metaphysical pronouncements on the world from some presumed position of exteriority.”16 Yet interpretations abound that position Barad’s work as though it were proffering a new ontology derived from quantum mechanics. What gets lost is the methodological dimension of how Barad reads scientific practices. Their rereading of Niels Bohr’s philosophy-physics attends to the apparatus as the condition of possibility for determinate meanings, to the cut that establishes experimental boundaries, to how measuring instruments actively participate in phenomena rather than neutrally mediating them. Barad explicitly warns against “exploiting what is seen as the greater epistemological value of the natural sciences over the human sciences.”17 Instead, “rather than simply assuming that quantum physics and the social exist at different non-overlapping scales, we first need to inquire into the very making of scale itself.”18 Scale emerges through specific practices of making sense rather than existing as a given framework. Crucially, Barad does not assume cross-scale entanglement but argues that scale is materialized through specific agential cuts—what counts as micro and macro is produced in the practice, not given before it.

Barad’s work is not an attempt to synthesize quantum physics and social theory but rather exposes the constitutive limitations of both when they are brought into encounter. It is a way to engage with theorizing as a “living and breathing reconfigurings of the world.”19 As they write, ontology is the “‘theorising of what is’ by materialising things in certain ways, a particular form of intra-acting, and as such part of the world” rather than a representation of how the world is from some external disembodied vantage.20

This is why the appropriations that quote Barad on entanglement and then proceed to deliver verdicts about “quantum reality” are doing something Barad’s own framework forecloses. They borrow the vocabulary while keeping intact the representational “is” that the vocabulary was meant to disturb. The entanglement on offer in such work is announced as a finding, a feature of the world that aesthetic experience can disclose. However, Barad’s entanglement is more complicated: a way of doing ontology that includes its own doing, a practice of materializing that cannot step outside itself to deliver a report. When such formulations—like the claim that Barad uses quantum to show how “matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the ‘Other’”—circulate as findings about reality, a double flattening occurs. First, quantum mechanics is treated as though it provides direct access to ontological truth rather than as a series of practices that invite philosophical interpretation. Second, Barad’s methodological emphasis is converted into a new metaphysical foundation. The very thing Barad critiques—the assumption that science simply reveals preexisting reality—gets reinstated in appropriations of their work. Barad’s methodological work gets turned into a TL;DR: “Everything is entangled, actually.”

So Many Interpretations!

Even if we were to grant, for argument’s sake, that quantum mechanics could provide direct access to reality, a tricky question still remains to be answered: Which quantum mechanics? The appropriation of quantum concepts as settled ontological ground proceeds as if “quantum mechanics” speaks with one voice about what exists. Yet quantum mechanics admits multiple, mutually incompatible interpretations—Copenhagen, Bohmian mechanics, many-worlds, relational quantum mechanics, QBism—each making radically different claims about what “really exists,” about the role of the observer, about determinism and indeterminacy. Depending on which interpretation one adopts, the quantum world might appear fundamentally “queer,” or decidedly less so. For example, Bohmian mechanics is deterministic with definite particle positions at all times, far closer to classical physics than to the fluid ontology that much quantum art celebrates.

This is the problem of underdetermination: the same experimental evidence, the same predictive success, the same equations—yet wildly divergent pictures of reality. The math doesn’t pick a winner, and a century of beefing over the ontology of quantum mechanics has not resolved anything. As Craig Callender argues, different interpretations “portray radically different worlds from top to bottom, agreeing on little more than what is observable.”21 The hope for a “safe zone” of agreed-upon quantum claims dissolves under scrutiny, and the underdetermination strikes at the heart of what quantum mechanics says about reality beyond measurement outcomes. We’re left with at least three major research programs describing dramatically different realities, each fully compatible with existing evidence. The queer quantum I’d been sold was one interpretation among several, and not even the most popular among physicists.22

Effacing this disagreement over its ontology, quantum art naturalizes one particular interpretive framework—usually something close to the Copenhagen interpretation, mediated through popular physics writing and a particular reception of new materialist philosophy. The result is a curious reversal: Art that positions itself as critical and politically engaged ends up reinforcing the authority of physics as the arbiter of ontological truth. Yet the term “ontology” itself operates ambiguously here—sometimes designating what fundamentally exists (metaphysical realism about quantum entities), sometimes referring to our best current descriptions of what exists (epistemic humility about quantum formalism), and sometimes collapsing this distinction entirely by treating successful scientific theories as transparent windows onto being itself. The discourse surrounding quantum art trades on this ambiguity, invoking ontology’s metaphysical weight while relying on physics’ epistemic authority.

Pierre Huyghe, Liminals, 2026. Installation view at Halle am Berghain, Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by Hartwig Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist. © 2026 Pierre Huyghe. Photo: Andrea Rossetti © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2026.

Pierre Huyghe’s “Liminals” (2026), also part of LAS’s Sensing Quantum program, expresses this slippage directly. The exhibition recycles older work of Huyghe’s, now in new quantum garb. Huyghe “strives to give form to what he calls the ‘radical outside’ of human subjectivity—a quantum reality of uncertainty and multiplicity.”23 Here, quantum mechanics becomes that which Barad’s work warns against: a means to escape situatedness, to achieve the god’s-eye view. LAS gives us Huyghe’s reheated nachos, with a side of god complex. That the exhibition is sponsored by Anthropic (one of the world’s largest AI companies, with obvious financial and political interests in the acceptance of physics-as-unmediated-truth) only underscores the point. What this framing elides is that quantum mechanics does not simply reveal reality. Determining what its formalism means requires philosophical, aesthetic, and political work that is never neutral.

Where Huyghe leans on the framing of quantum as a metaphysical condition to perform the elision, Prouvost leans on the hardware itself. A quantum computer was demonstrably involved in producing Prouvost’s piece (quantum noise was used to introduce indeterminate variations into the edit and imagery of the central film) and this technological feat becomes the ground for ontological vibes that far exceed what the technology’s functionality warrants. The accompanying texts speak of “quantum reality,” of experiencing what it feels like to sense reality from a quantum perspective. Yet the processor’s operations tell us only that quantum formalism is operative when properly implemented. The formalism works; engineers build quantum computers without settling the question of whether the wave function is real, whether particles have definite positions between measurements, or whether observation creates reality. A quantum computer operates identically whether one believes in Copenhagen indeterminacy or Bohmian determinism. Whether the processor’s predictions vindicate any particular interpretation of quantum remains entirely unsettled by the technology’s success. Prouvost displays technological robustness, and LAS drapes it in ontological sentiments: teasing us with tech to sell metaphysical possibility, engineering success obscuring its speculative edge.

Politicizing Quantum

This plurality of interpretations matters especially when quantum concepts are mobilized for explicitly political projects. If different interpretations encode different commitments and serve different explanatory goals, then any move from formalism to politics is itself a contested philosophical move, and the contest deserves to be visible.

Some of the most thoughtful work in this terrain takes the speculative dimension on as a starting point rather than concealing it. Black Quantum Futures (BQF), for instance, does important decolonial work on temporality, attending to the imperial forces behind temporal standardization. The project insists that “the time zone is no one’s but the master’s clock,” examining how the 1884 International Meridian Conference’s designation of the Greenwich Meridian restructured time around a Western-centered framework. The framework draws on African philosophical traditions of time, including the Mbiti-derived distinction between Zamani and Sasa, and connects them to a substantive practice of future visioning and event mapping. Unlike much work in the genre, BQF is also open about its speculative character: Rasheedah Phillips (one of the artists) describes BQF as a “vision and practice” rather than a descriptive science.24 Where other quantum-adjacent projects drape themselves in the working hardware or borrow scientific authority while pretending not to, BQF announces its creative and cosmological ambitions from the outset.

That openness, however, leads to a different question. If the framework is admittedly speculative, why bring quantum in at all? A text by Phillips suggests an answer in how quantum is recruited. Linear time, Phillips argues, is the dominant Western ontology; quantum shows that “assumptions of asymmetry fail at the microscopic level” and that linear time is not “an inherent or a priori feature of nature”; African time traditions, by contrast, have “always encompassed and anticipated the principles of quantum physics.”25 The claim is not that physics has vindicated African cosmology but that quantum has loosened the ontological field enough for the African alternative to be cosmologically live rather than merely folkloric. Quantum functions less as proof than as a permission structure.

The licensing move has two requirements, and both involve hidden contestations. The first concerns scale. Phillips limits quantum (as most scientists do) to “the atomic and molecular (‘micro’) levels” when introducing it, but the framework then operates at the level of personal timelines, ancestral memory, and historical recurrence.26 Retrocausality, entanglement, and observer-dependence are the features that do not straightforwardly scale up; the entire problem of decoherence is why macroscopic systems behave classically. BQF need not accept decoherence as final (the question is genuinely open in physics) but the framework transposes micro features upward without flagging that decoherence exists as a problem to be addressed. The contestation is not refused; it is hidden. The second requirement concerns interpretation. The quantum mobilized in BQF is essentially Bohmian, with elements of Copenhagen-flavored observer talk, and Bohm is cited directly. Choosing Bohm over other interpreters is itself a legitimate and interesting move; Bohm’s (later) realism and holism are unusually congenial to BQF’s cosmological ambitions. But the choice is made in the register of citation rather than argument. Bohm is invoked as “quantum,” not as one contested interpreter among others. An Everettian or QBist account of time and observation would look very different, and that fact never enters their orbit.

The two hidden contestations hold each other up. The permission structure only works if quantum unambiguously loosens the ontological field, and quantum only appears unambiguous if both decoherence and interpretive plurality are bracketed. The bracketing is what makes the licensing possible. One might object here that the call for visibility presupposes a clean line between science and speculation that decolonial frameworks rightly contest. The point does not require that line to be clean. It requires only that whatever moves are being made (scientific, philosophical, cosmological, or all at once) appear as moves rather than as scientific background that authorizes them without needing argument. The project contests the authority of one Western framework (the standardized clock) while drawing legitimating weight from another (quantum physics). The legitimation only holds if the second framework is presented in a more settled form than its own practitioners would recognize. The alternative would be to wear the speculation prouder, to let the African philosophical tradition stand as a cosmology in its own right, and where physics is engaged, to engage with its disagreements rather than its surface.

This raises a deeper question: Is ontology a necessary and sufficient platform for political action? The assumption that quantum indeterminacy or nonlinearity inherently supports progressive politics ignores how scientific concepts of contingency and flux have historically been deployed for both progressive and regressive purposes. Material plasticity can align as easily with capitalism’s chaotic tendencies as with the decolonial imagination. Determinism and contingency are not intrinsically tied to specific political orientations; treating them as such naturalizes what should be contested political choices about how to mobilize scientific concepts.27

None of this is to say that quantum mechanics has nothing to offer art and vice versa. The question is what kind of engagement would actually face the formalism rather than veiling it. The difficulty is not that these works speculate. It is that they often speculate while letting the working processor or the prestige of the formalism do the metaphysical work that the artists are actually doing. Since there is no consensus on what quantum mechanics exactly entails, any move from formalism to ontology is itself a speculative move, and there is no shame in that. The shame is in the elision. Interpretive plurality offers a clue to a different practice: Between equation and world lies substantial mediating activity that is at once philosophical, aesthetic, institutional, and political. This gap is not a deficit to be resolved by atmospheric fabulation, it is a site rich with (artistic) possibility. Work that took it seriously would wear its speculation prouder rather than quieter, naming its interpretive commitments, staging the disagreements it draws on, and finding in the unresolved arguments of physics a generative resource rather than an authority to borrow from. Such an art might be less immersive, less photogenic on an institutional website, and yes, considerably less vibey. But it would open quantum mechanics to art on terms that match the strangeness of the science itself: a formalism whose extraordinary predictive power coexists with a century of live argument about what it actually describes. That argument is the interesting, strange, and tantalizing part, and it is still very much going.