5th Dimensional Camera

5th Dimensional Camera

Tristan Andersen
Visual Art

5th-Dimensional Camera is a fictional quantum imaging device displayed as a sculpture alongside the “images” it produces. The aim of the artwork is to help viewers to be able to imagine and intuit complex scientific concepts and to consider the implications of those discoveries. The sculptural aspect of the piece consists of a comically sensitive-looking hunk of hardware mounted on a tripod above an array of delicate tanks, tubes, and valves. An acute red cone is mounted horizontally from the short end of a complicated digital box, the back of which bears a red numeric LCD display framed by two positioning handles. The cone’s wide end, which sits away from the box, features a “lens” made of an array of chrome spheres. The spheres are arranged in a perfect hexagonal point space, which mirrors the viewer and their background in identical multitudes. The entire unit connects with thermally insulated hosing to a tank of supercooled liquid gasses. This cryonic hardware is designed to resemble a quantum computer, a device which requires extremely low temperatures to function. The specific configuration and overall appearance of the tank and hose appear to be modeled directly after a machine housed at the Quantum Information Procession Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration, or QIP IRC, and featured in one of Superflux’s promotional videos. QIP IRC was one of several collaborators and consultants that worked with Superflux on this piece. The images that the instrument “produces” are displayed as full-sized prints alongside the machine. Each print consists of a grid of photos, each with similar figures in similar settings, but containing slight differences in each photo. The variations in each grid correspond with the compound-eye lenses of the device. Each grid comes with a story of how the pictured character came to encounter the imaging device. Each tells a complex tale of the variability of life, no one story able be told in four dimensions. Every photo, while different, is related to the others, showing the branching and diverging consequences of small choices.

One grid features the story of a man who has pointed the device out the front door of his apartment. Another shows a woman who has presented her most memorable event of the day to the camera on a large piece of paper. Another image shows a grid of photos depicting a man alone in different stages of considering ending his life. The minute differences in the scenes make one reflect on mostly unnoticed variables that direct the course of our lives.

The idea behind 5D Camera is informed by Hugh Everett’s “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum behavior, as well as the more commonly accepted Copenhagen Interpretation. The fictional device uses a quantum computer to read incoming photons, and track a complex mathematical super-state to return other possible scenarios which the current reality is happening in contrast to. One of the artists explains their inclusion of superpostion:

“Quantum superposition is the ability for certain very small objects to be in two or more states at the same time. Imagine a coin, not a conventional coin, a minute coin at the nanometer scale. If I could somehow toss it, then it wouldn’t need to be in simply heads and tails at the end, it could be simultaneously showing us heads and tails. It would have entered a state of quantum superposition”
— Jon Arden, Superflux co-creator

This is a great summary of the popular understanding of superposition: alive and dead, heads and tails, all at the same time, though it’s worth noting that superposition describes an even more profound effect of reality. The idea is not simply that two things happen at once, rather; it’s neither one, nor both or neither. This is a more complex and far less intuitive mathematical state, but it’s one of the most repeatable observations in physics. Exactly as confidently as one can observe that two apples next to two apples become four apples, a photon can be mathematically shown to exist in a paradoxical no-state. To give a specific example, one must consider a measurable circumstance that has two options. For instance, imagine receiving a photon, and knowing for certain that it has the option to come from your left or from your right. But as it turns out, under the most precise scrutiny modern science has to offer, the following four statements about the photon are paradoxically found to all be true:

it hasn’t come from the right

It hasn’t come from the left

It hasn’t come from both the right and the left

It hasn’t come from neither the right or the left.

The implications of this are profound: at the most precise level, reality does not have a traceable course of outcome. While this is only directly observable on the quantum scale, these seemingly insignificant nanoscopic interactions are the building blocks of our reality. In their multitudes, they ultimately determine the flow of causality, and our experience as a result. What these results say is that at some point in spacetime, every possible quantum interaction exists at once. Our past and by consequence, our present is only the result of one such outcome resolving. But what if all outcomes do resolve somewhere? 5th Dimensional Camera gives viewers the opportunity to imagine the outcomes that are constantly lost before ever being found, and how our very selves are a result of such unconscious choices.

“The 5th Dimensional Camera’ is a fictional device that captures glimpses of parallel universes suggested by quantum physics. How might we seek to interact with these other worlds? Would we become jealous of our parallel selves? What would happen to our sense of morality if we knew that we had committed inconceivable acts in another world?”
— ESPRC - https://epsrc.ukri.org/newsevents/casestudies/5thdimensionalcamera/

This is not the first time Superflux has created a fictional piece of hardware with the intention of provoking thought. Our Friends Electric is a video art piece consisting of three scenes about people in a near future whose lives are affected by the smart technology they own. The portrayed human-machine relationships focus on the increasing capabilities of computer voice software, which is rapidly becoming able to produce not only the prosody, but the personality of living beings. With the recent demonstration of Google’s personal voice assistant making calls to unsuspecting humans for appointments, the piece comes at an appropriate time. It challenges viewers to consider how our ability to create and organize sound gives us power over meaning, as well as how all this is changing as we model these abilities in software. The short film showcases devices which exist just outside of the current limits design. Each appears a tad sci-fi, but the user interface is intuitively familiar to us. A blue box that answers phone calls with radio dials for confidence and mood, a code-based intellectual companion onto which you can download in the complete works of your favorite authors, etc.

5th dimensional camera attempts to bring the same type of intuitive understanding to the more intimidating subject of quantum physics. By presenting quantum randomness in terms of the human effects it creates on a macroscopic scale, we’re reminded that the uncertain nature of our lived experience is rooted in the foundation of the universe.
5th Dimensional Camera has been displayed at MOMA’s interaction design exhibition “Talk to Me”.


5th Dimensional Camera has been displayed at MOMA’s interaction design exhibition “Talk to Me”.

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