ESSAY | Black Hole Ballerina. How I went to CERN and now I have quantum fever
- Yev Kravt
- May 23
- 11 min read
BY YEV KRAVT
At this moment in history, science and the spiritual world are intertwined more closely than ever before. Science, like art, enlarges reality by revealing that which was always there: once invisible forces now brought into the realm of human understanding. Entanglement theory. Quantum mechanics. Wave-particle duality. Over the past few years I’ve been grappling with these ideas, to understand not only how they manifest in physics, but how they could also be identified in art and design, and more importantly, how they could be felt rather than explained.
It hasn’t been easy. Often, the results feel unsatisfying. Quantum concepts tend to be reduced to metaphors for mystery, gesturing vaguely toward something that even scientists themselves admit cannot be explained in a few sentences (nor in five minutes, nor even days). Nonetheless, 2025 has been named the year of quantum. So, when I visited the Uncertainty Summit at CERN in Geneva earlier this year, this tension became even more tangible. During one of the sessions, Frédérick Bordry, former Director for Accelerators and Technology at CERN, drew a simple but powerful parallel between the role of science and the role of art.
Just as art reveals hidden dimensions of perception and experience, he explained, science expands the boundaries of what we consider real, whether by uncovering the invisible subatomic world or by constructing models that redefine what once seemed unknowable. It stayed with me, reframing my initial question entirely. Maybe it’s not about trying to explain the quantum world at all. Maybe it’s about learning to live with its uncertainty, allowing that uncertainty to change how we think, how we create, and how we curate.
That same day, Luis Álvarez-Gaumé, a theoretical physicist and Director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at New York’s Stony Brook University, quoted a phrase from the French student protests of May 1968: “Soyez raisonnable, demandez l’impossible.” Be reasonable, demand the impossible. In Álvarez-Gaumé’s hands, this slogan became a metaphor for quantum mechanics itself, a science that shattered the predictable world of Newton and revealed a universe far stranger than anyone could have imagined.
The discovery of quantum mechanics didn’t just change science; it forced a broader philosophical shift. Suddenly, certainty itself became a fragile illusion. Álvarez-Gaumé’s words remind us that our everyday logic, the logic that serves us when walking, building, surviving, is based on a human scale, where Newtonian rules work just fine. At the quantum level, though, that intuition collapses. “We don’t need quantum mechanics to survive,” he said. Understanding it demands a recalibration of intuition, like learning a new language with no perfect translation.
Álvarez-Gaumé also referenced an experiment from Leiden University in the Netherlands, whereby particles behave like waves, collapsing only when observed, that demonstrated how quantum phenomena defy deterministic logic. Scientific experiments, Álvarez-Gaumé suggested, are not just measurements, they are oracles. They offer glimpses into structures that our theories can barely hold. He left the audience with a thought that lingered long after the session ended: “Quantum mechanics is causal, but not deterministic.” It follows laws, but not laws we can predict like clockwork.
Outcomes are ruled by probabilities. The wave equation governs behavior, but the actual results remain fundamentally uncertain until the very moment of observation. In other words: the only certainty in quantum mechanics is uncertainty itself. It’s a paradox that reshapes our ideas of time, space and existence, over and over again. It is perhaps no wonder that Libby Heaney, a British artist and quantum physicist, refers to this as “quantum soup.” A lot is being invested in quantum technologies today, with hopes that they will revolutionize our future. But beyond the technological race, artists like Heaney are engaging with quantum phenomena, from entanglement to superposition, on a critical level, crafting immersive environments, game worlds and virtual experiences where the strange logic of quantum life becomes something we can momentarily inhabit.
Yes, we are inside it now: a thick soup of formulas, probabilities, observations and shifting meanings. And whether we try to cook with it, to swim through it, or simply to taste it, one thing is clear: the soup isn’t finished.
Learning to Speak Quantum
As far as I understand – and I say this not as a scientist, but as someone scientifically curious educated partly through some random newspaper articles, YouTube lectures, TikTok fragments and memories of high school lessons in Nijmegen with Mr. Moerkerk, the quantum formulas do not fit neatly because of one stubborn concept: time. Time, as we know it, is a human construction. It was useful for survival, but it doesn’t map cleanly onto the quantum world, where superposition, entanglement and non-locality break our familiar ideas of cause and effect, of past and future. At the Uncertainty Summit, Indian artist and curator Suddhabrata Sengupta, working with the Raqs Media Collective, draws these questions into a philosophical space. Invoking Madhyamika Buddhist philosophy, Sengupta reminds us of the concept of satyadvaya, or ‘the two truths’:
paramartha (ultimate meaning), the unspeakable, the preconceptual awareness that cannot be contained in language,
samvriti (conventional meaning), the ordinary truth, concealed within the names and categories we use to navigate the world.
Applied to the quantum world, this model feels eerily accurate. We move away from a raw, intuitive awareness of matter’s strangeness → to naming and measuring → and then, if we are lucky, towards a second-order awareness: a higher acceptance of what can never fully be grasped.
Today, the art that touches quantum uncertainty is moving along this trajectory: not necessarily toward greater mastery, but toward greater intimacy with ‘not knowing’ and the unspoken. Toward living with times that are fractured, layered and multiple. Toward languages that are unstable, shimmering and inclusive. Toward metaphors that are not set in stone, but connections that are stretched and criss-crossed possibilities.
Another interesting idea comes from the Peruvian artist and researcher Luis Enrique Zela-Koort. In comprehensive, unpretentious language, they explain that the language we use, the structures of thought we inherited, are outdated. When we speak today about queer metaphors, about non-linear or binary worlds, about uncertainty, we are no longer speaking about abstraction. We are speaking about the new conditions of reality. “Queer Metaphysics” is what Zela-Koort calls it; where objects reflect not fixed categories, but hypothetical processes.
The American theorist and writer Rasheedah Phillips works along similar lines. Her 2025 book, Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time, refuses the Western, linear segmentation of time into past, present and future. Phillips proposes the idea of CPT, or “Colored People’s Time”, not as a stereotype, but as a profound revaluation: an acknowledgment that Black communities, through historical struggle, have developed alternate forms of space-time experience. Forms where past, present and future bleed into one another; where space is not neutral, but charged with memory, struggle and possibility. Here, time is not a line but a field, not a prison but a possibility. Just as in quantum physics, where a particle can exist in multiple states at once, Black temporal-spatial practices create worlds where history is not behind us, but beside us, entangled with every step we take.
Art and Design Practices as an Oracle
In recent decades, a key shift has taken place in contemporary art that, with hindsight, feels logical. Artists concerned with scientific questions have stopped illustrating its governing concepts, embracing instead its many uncertainties. Rather than explaining the invisible, they construct environments where the invisible can be felt, proffering fields of probability over stable forms. At FACT Liverpool in 2018, the Broken Symmetries exhibition marked one of those moments. Artists who had undertaken residencies at CERN created works that did not translate data into images, but allowed data itself to behave, to tremble, to surprise.
In the 2020s, these tendencies only deepened. At the Venice Biennale in 2022, Yunchul Kim’s Gyre installation transformed the entire Korean Pavilion into a breathing organism. Composed of over 300 transparent polymer cells, constantly shifting in color and structure under internal kinetic pressures, Gyre performed a continuous state of flux, a material entanglement of energy, space and matter. Watching on, spectators felt themselves absorbed into a system larger than comprehension: a world where nothing stays still, and where the very act of observation alters the choreography of forms.
Meanwhile, Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene Pacha project presents a radical inversion of our technological dreams. Over the salt flats of Salinas Grandes, a solar-powered balloon, completely free of fossil fuels, batteries, helium or hydrogen, carried a human into flight, lifted only by the energy of the air and sun. This journey, recognized by world aviation records, became not just a technical achievement, but a symbolic ritual: a proposal for living differently, treading lightly, moving in tune with elemental forces. The air itself became a quantum field of potential, a fabric connecting earth, body and cosmos.
At Tate Modern, Anicka Yi’s 2021 project In Love with the World turned this same logic inwards. Suspended “aerobes” –autonomous, programmed organisms –floated through the Turbine Hall, reacting to the presence of visitors, and adapting their flight patterns in response to scent, temperature and motion. Scent itself – invisible, mutable – became the medium. Just as in quantum physics, where particles behave differently when observed, Yi’s aerobes shifted their course based on the invisible cues of human proximity. The exhibition space took on a visceral atmosphere, itself becoming an entangled web of organism and observer.
Elsewhere, Libby Heaney pushes quantum phenomena directly into the digital sphere. Working with quantum computing technology, the artist creates immersive virtual environments where entanglement and superposition are not simply visual metaphors but structural conditions. In her installations and VR works, the player exists in multiple states at once, navigating worlds that dissolve then reassemble unpredictably and experiencing firsthand the collapse of classical logic. Her work performs quantum theory through immersion, play and glitch.
In 2025, another project tuned itself in to the delicate frequencies of uncertainty. At Berlin’s LAS Art Foundation, Laure Prouvost presented WE FELT A STAR DYING, a large-scale installation that asked: What might it feel like to sense reality from a quantum perspective? And more provocatively: What does it mean to build machines from this perspective? Working in collaboration with philosopher Tobias Rees and quantum physicist Hartmut Neven, Prouvost entered the world of quantum computing as a translator, expanding scientific principles into textures, sounds, scents and sensations.
Quantum computers, as she discovered, are not just advanced machines, but fragile instruments. Highly sensitive to heat, vibration and even cosmic radiation, they function or fail because of quantum fluctuations: the tiny, random pulses of energy that started with the Big Bang and have never stopped since. Uncertainty is not a glitch. It is their essence. Prouvost does not attempt to represent her thoughts scientifically. Instead, her multi-sensory installation responds to fragility through light, scent, sculpture, video and sound. The result is not an explanation of quantum computing, but an experience of it: a disorienting, poetic machine where the boundaries between perception, data and the cosmos oscillate back and forth.
Across these diverse practices, a common thread emerges, that artists are not illustrating but practicing quantum mechanics, constructing systems where uncertainty is not an obstacle, but a medium; where perception is not about fixing meaning, but about dwelling inside ambiguity. This is where art becomes an oracle, revealing the ongoing tremors of the present. The field of the exhibition, like the field of quantum matter, is a place that’s alive with great potential and shared vulnerabilities.
Radical Closure
The 21st century dissolves the certainties of time itself. At the CERN Summit, I found myself circling back to an idea that was best articulated by the scientist Richard Feynman, who stated simply: “I can live with doubt.” A hundred years of uncertainty are better, he suggested, than a single day spent being certainly wrong. Half in protest, Einstein himself famously remarked that “God does not play dice with the universe.” Yet quantum mechanics seems to insist that chance, probability and non-local effects are at the heart of existence. Amidst thus chaos, patterns do still emerge, though the idea of certainty, that cause leads neatly to effect, that time flows only forward, is shattered. Particles entangled across vast distances behave as if they are one. In quantum experiments, outcomes can seem to influence causes retroactively. Effect before cause; a fundamental inversion.
In his writings on ‘radical closure’, the Lebanese artist and filmmaker Jalal Toufic gives this uncertainty a metaphysical form. Toufic describes radical closure as a space disconnected from ordinary continuity, a zone where the rules of time, presence and logic break down. He likens it to the black hole’s event horizon: a boundary beyond which information no longer returns, where causality dissolves and identities blur. In this suspended space, meaning floats; we’re inside, but we don’t know how we entered, nor when, or if, we will exit. Toufic’s examples, from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks to the collapsing rituals of war and mourning, show that radical closure is not an escape. It is an intensified encounter with non-meaning, a durational haunting. Could a black hole, then, be the ultimate quantum artwork? A sculptural form where time folds inward, where knowledge becomes impossible, and yet, precisely because of that impossibility, a new kind of experience emerges?
In 2022, at documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa embodied this intuition in curatorial practice. Rather than presenting art as static objects within fixed walls, ruangrupa cultivated a living, shifting system called lumbung, borrowing the Indonesian word for “communal rice barn,” where harvests are stored collectively and redistributed according to need. They proposed that art, knowledge and resources are not owned but harvested together, through acts of care, sharing, negotiation and trust. They refused the linear temporality of Western exhibition-making, reimagining conventional chronologies of production, display, consumption and archiving. Instead, ruangrupa cultivated a spacetime of continuous becoming, where exhibitions were not finished, where works were not closed, and where visitors became participants in an unfolding ecosystem.
Their model, drawn from collective practices in both Indonesia and other non-Western contexts, resonated deeply with the quantum idea of entangled existence: an existence where separation is an illusion, and where outcomes emerge unpredictably from shared fields of relation. And if time, as Feynman once suggested, might be understood as a spectral radio signal – drifting through the abandoned station of the universe – then to work with quantum materials today is not to sculpt certainty, but to tune into the trembling frequencies of partial existence. To acknowledge that, as we try to touch a meteorite older than the Earth itself, we are also reaching backward through time, toward forms of matter, memory and connection we can barely comprehend.
The artists who embrace this, be it Kim with his kinetic fluids, Saraceno with his aerosolar rituals, Yi with her sensing aerobes, Heaney with her quantum VR worlds, Prouvost leaning into the noise, are all creating new materials. They are also cultivating new temporalities. They are proposing that not knowing, not grasping fully, not mastering, can itself be a form of knowing. An active, ethical, luminous uncertainty.
Conclusion
As our discussion concludes, we begin to see that it is not certainty that moves us forward, but the ability to live inside uncertainty. Quantum mechanics shattered the dream of a fully knowable universe: it showed that at the smallest scales, reality behaves according to probabilities, not certainties. Particles exist in superpositions. Time may ripple backward as well as forward. Observation itself shapes what is seen. Perhaps this is the true ethic of quantum materials in art and design: not to solve uncertainty, but to dwell within it. To resist the temptation of premature closure. To strive not for mastery, but to listen to forces, to fluxes, to whispers inside matter itself.
Art and design, like quantum theory, invites us to rehearse: to make spaces where not-knowing is not failure, but potential; where doubt is not paralysis, but movement; where the unknown is not a void, but an invitation. Artists and designers are building systems where uncertainty is not an obstacle, but a material. We are, all of us, still cooking in the quantum soup, still dancing on the edge of a blackhole, twirling in the gravitational pull of the unknown. We are not lost. We are becoming.
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