If one of the challenges is to open the gaze beyond our ordinary experiences, staging a quantum wonder proves to be an important element for a number of approaches. In this respect, some artists go as far as rediscovering “cloud cham-bers”, those ancestors of particle detectors that have become curiosities of the history of physics. When looking at the Memory Vapor (2011) installation by the Russian-Belarusian artist duo Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand, multiple eva-nescent colored traces appear in the cloud chamber. A fascinating window into the infinitely small, the machine quickly becomes populated with condensation trails that testify to the random passage of particles, like so many wander lines.

Some scientists themselves, driven by a desire to share the poetic charge of sci-ence, undertake an artistic approach and take laboratory objects as their subjects. Physicist Olivier Dadoun thus “exfiltrated” a particle detector from the scientific world to use it as an “artistic trigger”21. More metaphorically, the installation and performance Quantum Dream, the Day I Imagined the Ocean (Virgile Novarina, Walid Breidi, and Labofactory, 2020) combines the imaginations of fluid mechanics, cognitive sciences, and quantum physics to artistically explore the intense cortical activity that accompanies our sleep.

This fleeting, indeterminate, and elusive infinitesimally small can also be exposed in all its strangeness, which seems to be one of the driving forces behind the approach of Korean artist Yunchul Kim. His work Cascade (2018), a complex tech-nological machine, resembles a tentacled living organism, with parts filled with fluids that react to the detection of muons. This revelation of a fabulous scientific reality is also the register chosen by Josèfa Ntjam in her sculpture Luciferin Drop (2020), accompanied by the film Myceaqua Vitae (2020). Inspired by her residency at a Canadian laboratory specializing in particle astrophysics, SNOLAB, the two works blend the genres of the marvelous and science fiction to tell the story of the transport of a curious luminous matter through a spacecraft. The story echoes the functioning of a dark matter detector based on the scintillation of liquid argon.

These works share the common point of using, literally or metaphorically, devices that allow scientists to visualize quantum phenomena, to show a wider audience what is observed. Other works also rely on digital media to evoke the understand-ing of unusual orders of reality. In his exhibition Supersymmetry (2014), Ryoji Ikeda proposes an immersive installation based on the superposition of minimalist sound compositions with digital images, some of which refer to the continuous interpretation of data flows, while others show the collision of particles on illu-minated boxes to evoke the physical concept of “supersymmetry”.

Quantum theory also interests artists for the philosophical questions it raises. Through the installation The View from Nowhere (2018), the British artist duo Semiconductor questions the meaning of scientific theory, its objectivity, and more generally, the place of man in the world, by making the culture of the labo-ratory and the institutional contexts of knowledge production manifest. Finally, some approaches seek to provoke a critical reflection on established categories and the emergence of new possibilities. Quantum theory, with its indeterminate nature and questioning of the ordinary, lends itself well to such interrogations explored by British and Canadian artists Libby Heaney and Ben Bogart.

Quantum sensation

When we began discussing a collaboration that would blend art, quantum physics, and philosophy with artist Caroline Delétoille and physicist Aurore Young, several themes spontaneously came to mind. Young’s interference experiment, perhaps “the most beautiful experiment in physics”22, the observer-observed object-ob-servation device entanglements, and, in relation to Caroline Delétoille’s work,