Firgun Ventures Podcast

Transcript


Dr Kris Naudts 0:06


Welcome to Time to Talk Quantum. I'm Dr Kris Naudts, neuroscientist, academic, psychiatrist, founder of Culture Trip and now co-founder of Firgun Ventures. Today I'm joined by Refik Anadol, an internationally renowned media artist and a pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine learning. His large-scale immersive AI works have inspired audiences around the world. Refik teaches in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts, is the director and co-founder of Refik Anadol studio in Los Angeles, and is co-founder of Data Land, the world’s first museum of AI art, soon to open. I am also joined by Bob Coecke, a theoretical physicist and former chief scientist at Quantinuum. Bob previously served as professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the University of Oxford, where he continues to teach and mentor. Alongside his research, he is exploring the emerging field of quantum music. 

Dr Kris Naudts 1:05 Okay, Refik, looking at your work and at your output, it's hard to categorise you. Are you an artist? Are you a technologist? Are you a founder, CEO, an athlete? Tell me. 

Refik Anadol  1:14  Yeah. So I mean, I'm an artist, and I'm a media artist. I love science and technology. I have a huge respect and love for science, and as a child learning about, you know, technology through computation, and I just cannot forget the feeling of like being able to communicate with machines in a way that I think that that feeling of a joy, like with machine that can program it or play with it, or create imagination through some form of thinking. It is the core I think about being an artist, but I'm not a scientist. I wish I am, I’m not an architect, but I have so much love and respect.  

Dr Kris Naudts 1:51 Okay, wonderful. What would you say to that? Bob?  

Bob Coecke 1:53 Oh, the same question. Actually, I started off as an architect in Belgium. That was my first my first study, and then I did physics, but I ended up being a professor of computer science. But throughout my life I've always done art, like some failed projects, the music is going a little bit better, and I'm very glad now that I can combine some of my main profession, which is a quantum physicist, with also the sort of music I'm doing by building new instruments, creating new concepts, and bring the philosophy which I think is fundamental in quantum, to a broader audience than a usual science and technology audience. 

Dr Kris Naudts  2:28  Yes, indeed. I mean there has been a lot of quantum and art shows in London, Munich, all over the place, really. And Refik, you yourself have done some work, of course. I mean, could you tell us a bit more about quantum memories? Your work with Google, Melting Memories? Very keen to hear more about that.  

Refik Anadol 2:55 Yes. So, I mean, the project started almost, I will say, four or five years later. I was so fortunate in 2016 literally 10 years ago, literally around this time, I was in an event in a Gray Area in San Francisco. It was an event about Deep Dream, the algorithm that the Google friends just open source and share the logic of back propagation, a concept around the Gan models that they had been experimenting. And I remember that week was an amazing like, understanding, like, wait a minute, like, if a machine can learn, can it dream? Can it hallucinate? Because, as the artist, like, always ask the question of, what is beyond reality, and I felt that it's a very near distance, like fun experiment through these models because what was very fun artistically thinking, like how these systems can generate form of art. And again, 10 years ago, the idea of a thinking brush, I guess, is, was like very closely imagine. And then this experiment was a very fun to learn the very early GAN models. Then a year later, meeting with Jensen Huang, and then Nvidia friends, which was pretty much in that style again, and many major research they both share their incredible research and compute with us. And in the last 10 years, we trained more than 400 AI models, and work with more than five petabytes of raw image archives. And I believe this is one of the largest data sets that have been experimented to make art through custom models. And then five years later, 2021 I think that was the breakthrough, the Google AI quantum team and Hartmut Nevan and wonderful team there just, I think, released their quantum advantage experiment. And the same team was looking for a way of like collaborating with their role of data sets of quantum circuits and the noise inside the circuit depths. And I found that it's a fascinating time, because, I mean, I mean as an artist, as a person loving science fiction, and it was also around the same time the, I think the Devs right, Alex Garland's incredible story about this dystopian side of quantum mechanics and physics. But it was a perfect time time that I felt how actually could be an opportunity to think about noise, but instead of again, models, perhaps many roles, interpretation of Hugo Everett's research, which, you know, also Caltech (California Institute of Technology) like here in studio 20 minutes, I've been like, learning about a lot about his research, and I just challenged the team that what will happen if he can take the noise of that research and apply logic in a way that make the invisible visible. So that was like a very fun, ultra joyful, fully experimental, but also based on the real data sets from their experiment. 

Kris Naudts 5:35  How did, how did that happen Refik, that Hartmut Nevan and Jensen Huang took an interest in you and your work. Did you know them already? Did you pitch to them? How did this happen?  

Refik Andol 5:46 It was all, I mean, I have been to first of all, 2014, I mean, very much. Our first artwork in November went live in San Francisco on a building that Mark Benioff, the Salesforce CEO and his new building, he was very happy to open the building with a pioneering artwork. There was more than 1000 applications, I believe ours was using real time data as a form of art and a three dimensionally represent the data sculpture concept. So I believe it was one of the first data sculpture examples. And people who are walking around, I mean, Bay Area and, like, obviously in San Francisco, heard the artwork, and they were just like, start emailing, like, okay, like, there's a sculpture in downtown, in three dimension. And then I met with through this Google friends and Nvidia friends, and many, many, many amazing pioneer people in technology. And they were like, asking, oh, we have this data. We have that data. Can this data, I mean, that just transform this concept of, can data become a pigment? Can data become a memory that doesn't dry, that doesn't have any Newtonian physics of, like classical, I guess pigment, right? It doesn't need to dry. It can ever change. It can be computed. It can it can remember. It's, I guess, previous and the next frame. That was like that concept trigger, I guess, many people's imagination, and naturally got emails through those wonderful teams and challenge us and challenge them over the years and still keep going,  

Dr Kris Naudts 7:13 Amazing. But you don't do your work by yourself. You must have a whole team behind you? 

Refik Anadol 7: 16Yes. So I have been dreaming to become a studio since the beginning of my grad study at UCLA, where I'm teaching last 10 years, and the idea behind my MFA studies was really the idea of a studio, but a concept of a studio that doesn't look like a classical painting or a sculpture studio, but a place for imagination through science and research, and try to find this incredible team of people that I can expand the concept of art, science and technology, in a way that we can all deep dive into different topics. Now, half of our studios data scientists and AI scientists, and we have, you know, architects and engineers and scholars, neuroscientists, but the idea is, here is 30 people right now we are like practicing this form of art in a way that has a deep research in it, and it's like a very complex technologies in it. And I think a form of lab more like a lab, I guess is more close, or a class like if we are 20 people in Los Angeles, I feel I'm in a class of 20 wonderful people deep diving in challenges. It's a new form of thinking about studio and art making in the 21st Century. And I believe that practicing as a group of people to innovate multiple, I guess, mediums together and cross disciplinary like imagination with respect to any discipline, is a fascinating type of art making I think. And with AI now, whole different world. 

Dr Kris Naudts 8:43 But these people, these people, are presented with a unique opportunity to work with you, to work with each other, because there is no other places in the world where they could do what they do.  

Refik Anadol 8.52 I think that's one, one of one way of framing. I'm grateful. I mean, I don't want to say a world class art making, because maybe world class research is something exceptionally hard, but I believe we do world class art making in using science and technology and working with the pioneers of the field, and using cutting edge technology and an incredible data sets with permission, with ethics. So we never touch someone's data without permission. We always and always ask permission, and we never do any shortcuts, and we never change our compass. So our values are strong and we never change them. And I think it makes our practice very different than other art studios, and also makes us responsible as a leader in the field. 

Dr Kris Naudts 9:36  The big thing coming up, of course, is Dataland, the opening thereof, which is, I think is imminent. Will there be a quantum wing there or? 

Refik Anadol 9:46  Absolutely! I mean, we designed the museum in a way. So first of all, I'm so grateful that last almost 10 years, we worked with incredible museums like MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art) [Centre] Pompidou, NGV (The National Gallery of Victoria) Guggenheim. I mean, so grateful. But the problem with these museums of let's say, last century, are challenged by different worlds. For example, these museums are kind of has to like, deal with many, many disciplines, many, many like forms of arts, and it takes so much time for them to recognise artists and their practice. And there's millions of artists and trying to be seen and shine, and I'm so grateful one of them, and I'm especially at MoMA, we received 3 million people in one year. It was the largest audience in 200 years, and it was the first AI work collected by the museum. And it's an incredible statement and a beautiful moment. But the question for me was, for me, it took like, one year to practice, one year to, like, get it done, you know, one year to exhibit. And so much time and resource. But the AI at the moment and how the scenes and technology changing is fascinating fast. What is an institution that can be as fast as I guess, the size and the movement and it always be present and reflect back the challenges and the innovations and discoveries and breakthroughs. So that's what I saw in this last 10 years. The speed of innovation and discoveries are not matching the speed of curation and exhibitions. So the question is, can Dataland be a solution to this problem of time and space, and create a form of, I guess, art a place for breakthroughs collaborations, and that's why we thought that AI quantum computation, of course, neuroscience and things that are hard to understand and hard to perceive, and always like this idea of, I guess, making invisible visible, right? So, so, so I say that sometimes, you know, I mean, quantum mechanics has no image, right? I mean it's, it's invisible. But I mean, always a challenge is, for me, like translating this cold, mathematical noise into something right? Felt organic and emotional. So like I felt that this, you know, using nature and water, clouds and all that kind of interfaces can be a fun way of making invisible visible. So those are the ideas at DataLand. I think we want to challenge ourselves. 

Dr Kris Naudts 12:17  What will be in the museum? What will you open with? And when will it open?  

Refik Anadol 12: 19 So we are hoping to be in a couple of months, spring 26, we are not sleeping. We are literally in the museum with a team of wonderful people. So the museum has an incredible technology. Thanks to our friends at Google and Nvidia, they allowed us to like imagine one of the most advanced space of any form of art. Just for some context, we have 1.2 billion pixels. That is approximately we have 644k signals in five galleries. I mean, imagine the resolution and we have a real time scent augmentations that I have been working on for last four years, the idea of like can the latent space of scent molecules could be a part of a story in real time, personalised per person, not like a diffuse in the air, but a personalised experience and lots of other layers of sensors in the museum will be real time interacting with large nature model. So our attempt for large language models last four years, we research and ethically receive half billion images of nature from ethical sources.  

Dr Kris Naudts 13:37  Did you say half a billion?  

Refik Anadol 13:38 Yes, and all ethically sourced from Smithsonian, Natural History Museums and incredible archives and thanks to again Nvidia friends, allowed us to create a new model for us from scratch. And then recently, Google friends allowed us to train a model which artwork is running in their headquarters, Gradient Canopy, where the founders are. So I have so much respect and love to AI space, but it's so hard as an artist without using the current product and services, how to navigate with our own voice is the ultimate challenge.  

Dr Kris Naudts 14:14  Who collects your work Refik? 

Refik Anadol 14:16  I think after I will say the museum recognition our work is in the very significant art collectors. These are people that maybe never collect digital art before. They are people that are just getting understanding the idea of a data sculpture, data paintings. They have been like looking for collecting digital art but whereas reserves, and some, I guess, their reserves to use complex technologies. And then also, recently, I see a lot of people in the tech industry that has been innovating new ideas and concepts. I think they are. I mean, first of all, the AI art history is only 10 years. It's amazing to have this short span. And so it's like track back, who've been doing in what, And so on, so that's good news, more collector... 

Refik Anadol 15:00  Because if you think about a painting and sculpture, we can go back to many, many centuries, and there's always this, like, you know, little bit, I guess, a late moment for the form of art, because the time is past and the value is high, and it's hard to keep up with that, you know, historical context, but AI art is 10 years, and I believe that's what many people realising that, wait a minute, we're in a Renaissance, and at the Renaissance, there's an artist that's creating this work, and I can collect this work, right? That's a very easy and also, I think what people are realising is So, for example, as an artist, I born in and I saw the birth of internet, web one, web two, web three, AI, quantum computation. I mean, it's a fascinating 20 years of witnessing that how the world change in front of us. And I feel that I am a native of this medium. I feel that this is my core medium that I witness. So it's not like going back to like, 500 years and try to inherit, like a painting technique that is like, you know, a response to a time. So I feel that people are realising that, oh, wait a minute, there are artists living in our time responding to reality, and that should be the value for the next, I guess, centuries.  

Dr Kris Naudts 16:16 Yes, no, it's fascinating. And the comparison with Leonardo da Vinci and Florence, I mean, it did occur to me before this podcast. Now I would have expected you and Dataland to be situated in San Francisco rather than LA? 

Refik Anadol 16:28  Very good point. But I felt that LA has this, a very unique situation. So I feel that some, I mean, if there is a like in 100 years, if we go back and look at the birthplace of AI, I feel like it is somehow in California, there's a high chance, right? But I felt that LA has a different voice. The LA has is like, of course, the history of architecture, history of music and history of cinema and history of Performing Arts. I think LA has a much more culturally engaged and innovative breakthroughs across the decades. And I felt that, of course, as California, if you look at as like a whole whole picture, I felt that LA is a cultural, I guess, stream of, stream, like the force for AI to become creative, while the Bay Area is more scientifically situated for different breakthroughs and reality. So I felt that LA is a different place for cultural context. 

Dr Kris Naudts 17:33 It's very interesting you say that. I mean, there was a fantastic exhibition here about maybe five years ago in the Design Museum in London, which was indeed comparing the design scene in San Francisco with the design scene in LA, and they and they did it through, indeed, visualising the counterculture from San Francisco that led to the very functional design you see in the in the Facebooks of the world, for lack of a better example. And they contrasted it with the exuberance of the design for the 1980s Olympics in LA. And it was, it was incredibly well done. I will send you after the after recording. You will you will enjoy looking at it. One of the best exhibitions I've ever seen, actually.  

Refik Anadal 18:11  I mean, it's incredible. I mean, again, Bay Area has so much, of course, innovation and discoveries. I mean, but I just believe that California as a whole, that I felt that there is this, you know, desire for many breakthroughs. And if you go back to, like, LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) as a museum, art and technology, like 60s and early 70s. I mean, it was this idea of, like technology giants and the artists can come together to innovate new form of art. And it's an incredible thinking, right? I mean, it was the very first computation mixed with arts and supported by a museum. So it's a very important historic milestone there. 

Dr Kris Naudts 18:47 Yes, and Google's quantum AI team is also in California in LA? 

Refik Anadol 18:52 Correct, yes, yes, they are here. And, yeah, I learned a lot from them. I mean, I'm sure many amazing people researching at the same time, but for me, like quantum memory as a project was my first introduction to circuit depths, you know, quantum mechanics that has no image, right? And the idea of noise, I mean noise is, to me, in my work, is incredibly important, mathematically to make a beautiful sculptures through, so in my practice, what I felt that data as an invisible force, or invisible memory of life that can turn into a memory, and I guess texture and colour and other things than the numbers, right? As soon as that imagination opened up, I felt that like, you know, that's noises becomes a texture, right? So, but textures of realities, right? So anyway, there's a lot of deep, deep thinking that allow me to respect so much quantum space.  

Dr Kris Naudts 19:51 To what extent is the Web3 community tuned into this quantum movement and quantum art? 

Refik Anadol 19:55  Super important one. So we actually create this artwork with an additional of 1000 

unique paintings, data paintings, or quantum data paintings. So we generated this 1000 unique pieces, and each has been sold to support research because in the there was a there was a quantum research focus gathering a research event. And we gifted, I believe 200 artwork so 200 researchers, and the value of those artworks right now, I think more than $6,000 or something. They were like, less than $500. No, they are, like, very valuable. But the idea is, there is, like, you know, research, research, support research, create value with art. I mean, because people are always like thinking this very much transactional, but the idea of art is creating value. I mean, this value can be from cultural, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and quantifiable. I mean, it's economical. So I felt that when all this connects together, that makes a beautiful like these layers of layers of realities, and make a beautiful new gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) moment, I guess because all these layers of realities and the layers of values create something bigger than what they are individually, right?  

Dr Kris Naudts 21:18 Yes, yes, yes. Super interesting. I'm going to bring in Bob here to talk a bit about quantum and music in particular, because that's your passion. But maybe, before you do that, could you also tell us a little bit about that fantastic project you've done with the kids to visualise quantum 

Bob Coecke 21:34 So I can directly anticipate things we hear. Like many words was mentioned. Noise was mentioned. So, I mean, I was in Oxford, like, a few weeks ago, or maybe month. I can't remember at what the Oxford University quantum centenary conference was where I played, where I played together with on my quantum guitar with an orchestral organ. But there you see that the understanding of quantum mechanics is so all over the place, and these are professionals. Some people think there's many worlds. Some people think it's about like decoherence and noise. I'm sort of in the camp which doesn't go back to the Renaissance, but which goes back to the Presocratics. So at the time, like bifurcation took place in science, there was Heraclitus and there was Parmenides. And Parmenides felt that reality was about pictures, just static pictures, one after the other.  

Bob Coecke 21:38 Heraclitus felt reality was about processes. Physics to the permitted as pictures, together with Democritus as picture, where everything can be taken down into pieces, like little pieces of data, and that's how you build everything up. Quantum is about relations. It's about relationship. There's nothing new. We as humans, we think relational. We don't think in terms of, okay, I'm sitting here in front with Kris, so I want to know what he's made up from, and I start to cut you up. That's not what we did. We did this in science. We did this in anatomy, genetics, particle physics, set theory, that we break everything down in pieces. So I try to think about things relationally, and that's actually where the music comes in. 

Bob Coecke 23:25  I mean, in the same vein, the picture project that I did with the children is effectively a new quantum mechanical formalism, which is about relations. And something was said before that we can't see Quantum. The whole point was, yes, we draw quantum in terms of pictures, and we get a full-blown alternative formalism for quantum mechanics. So what we did, what we did with the teenagers, was we basically taught them a course which was completely modeled after an Oxford University postgraduate, full blown course. They didn't know. We just said, Okay, you can get a summer course for free, and then you can put this on your CV, and then that's good for applying to the universities and all of that and it's in the summer, and we don't care how well you do; you get a certificate. So, in we got like about 1000 applications. We randomly selected about 60 or 70, just to make things practical. Otherwise it would be unmanageable, because such a course involves like interaction with tutors, where you got 10 students, or 12 students, we want tutors, so we need to do that. So we had our 60, 70, randomly selected students. At the end, we went through the course like it was all online. It was all online, we had videos for the lectures. We made some exercises, and then there was a tutorial session each week. Eight weeks. At the end, we said, can you please test us on how well we did? So here are a few exercises. Show them what you can do on them, and then we know how bad we did, or whatever. Now this, these questions were all Oxford University postgraduate exam questions, quantum translated to the visual quantum language, 50% got a distinction. So, so that's it. Now to move from this to quantum music, when I start to do this diagrammatic quantum mechanics, which, as far as I'm concerned, is almost like art in itself. I was giving a lecture at McGill University in 2005 and Jim Lambek was in the audience.  Jim Lambek is one of the founders of computational linguistics, like, I mean, people, you know, stuff [Noam] Chomsky did and all of that. And when he saw my quantum diagrams. Said, Hey, Bob, this is grammar. So he realised that the sort of work he did for so many years was exactly the same structures as the quantum diagrams. And as a result, as a result, 

 we kind of started quantum natural language processing on the back of this. And I mean, and then in in 2020 we did quantum natural language processing on actual hardware. 

Bob Coecke 26:30  And then I met with Eduardo Reck Miranda , who's a professor of computer music, and he wrote me, and you want to do a project together with me, and then we came up with the idea, we're going to take this natural language processing engine which has grammar and meaning, linguistic grammar, and linguistic meaning. We take away linguistic grammar, we put in musical grammar. We take away linguistic meaning, we put in musical meaning. And then we generated the first ever piece of music generated by a quantum computer, which ended up number one in some classical charts.  

Dr Kris Naudts 27:09 Fantastic.  

Bob Coecke 27:10 So that's, that's so, so there is a direct climb from the quantum diagrams to basically this, this initial quantum music stuff.  

Dr Kris Naudts 27:20 But you've got a band.  

Bob Coecke 27:22 Oh, I mean, I've been playing a band since the late 80s, and we were start, we used was pretty heavy music. We used computers. So it was industrial music for if you know the names of bands, like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. We were kind of doing the same stuff. But then, then, because of all kind of travelling I had to do to get an academic career and to become an Oxford professor or whatever, the music was never released until 2020 and by then people realised that the stuff we were doing was kind of pioneering, but I didn't buy that argument. So I said, I have to do something else, so I built a quantum guitar, and now I'm truly pioneering industrial music.  

Dr Kris Naudts 28:08 Very exciting. Yeah, this is a question for both of you, and we get it ourselves a lot at Firgun too. When is the first use case for quantum going to come? What's the first business case? Could that first use and business case actually be in entertainment and in media? 

Refik Anadol 28:26  The power of, I guess, arts and culture in general, the scale of an application, I guess, is very different than I guess scientific and product service play. So I don't know which one has the right value. But I know that when it comes to imagination, I think we can apply creativity way faster than in applied research and scaling techniques and all that stuff. So I know that I guess creativity is a much more quick and much more fun and and less unattached and to any rules and regulations of you know, I see that there's a freedom of imagination is way quicker, shortly, and that sometimes, of course, I mean, I don't know how, how this makes sense, but the cinema, right? Storytelling concept way quicker to, I guess, observe and understand and phenomena, art making through installations are fast. And I mean, in the age of AI, I'm just guessing quantum AI, World of thinking how it can scale, I see more quicker in my, in my in my mind, but, I mean, what I feel, if it makes sense, but so I see this, like classical comms are lights are on and off, right? I mean, quantum comms are kind of like a dimmer, dimmer switch, or a sphere, right? As a visualisation of like, I hear this all the time. So instead of like Like I see if quantum becomes a pigment, let's say like that. And I see that it's not just pixel, but it is painting with probability, right? And that pigment in the in the hands of creativity, again, cinema, performance and music and, you know, whatever, architecture, I think it is this idea of any of, I guess, primary color for humanity, primary material for humanity. I mean, instead of like using concrete, glass or steel, I mean, can quantum become a material for imagination of architecture? Can we? I mean, as a creative again, I just first see those applications in reality. And of course, I'm guessing light is the primary material to visualize these worlds at the end, but I see a quicker array of experiments there. 

Dr Kris Naudts 30:54   

And you don't need 1000s of logical qubits? 

Bob Coecke 30:59 I mean, you don't need a quantum computer. You don't need a quantum computer to simulate quantum stuff. So whenever, and I'm going back now, to the 90s, when I started to realise that quantum mechanics was really about composition of systems, which goes back to Schrodinger. Then, as I was a musician, I was thinking like, how would this increment musically? And when you look at the classical musical score, like typical, your bars, then they're all disconnected. You got one instrument, you got another instrument, you got another instrument, you got another instrument. For a symphony, they're all disconnected. Of course, they're all disconnected, in the composer's mind they're all connected, but we don't see the collections. And it's while implicitly in the way our composer composes, these collections are there in his head, but you don't write them down. They're not represented. So one of the recent projects I did we had this again, because composer is basically come up with a new musical language where you actually see which is all about having the connections which are implicit in the structure of the music explicitly. Now that's, that's notation. So one of what, some I mean, two shows we did, one in Munich and one in Berlin, is basically where he played on his grand piano, I played on my quantum guitar, and we were an entangled system, and we measured each other, and we were entangled, and all these connections were there in the way we related to each other. Of course, that's a completely different way of playing music from what one usually does, although jazz musicians do this anyway, stuff like that, but we kind of more structured the interactive process that you could actually see, oh, a measurement is taking place. Bang, I collapse. He collapses too. So we tried to make this more explicit because, like, a composition which has like, two lines and which is called bell after Bell inequalities, and it's basically saying, Well, this guy, like, basically measures the other guy, and otherwise you can do whatever you want. So that's but, yeah, I mean, I had this idea in the late night. I gave one talk about this at the Art Institute in Chicago, because that was a job interview which I didn't get, and that was the end of my art career. And then I ended up in Oxford.  

Dr Kris Naudts 33:32 I see, I see, now, yeah, those are examples of use cases in terms of business cases within entertainment, could, gaming be the first industry where quantum really makes a big business impact? Gaming always pushes the boundaries, ask  Nvidia.  

Bob Coecke 33:48 I mean, we have recent case of a quantum entertainment company which moved from art to gaming, and that was the first quantum entertainment company, as far as I know, which is Moth Quantum. I happen to be a founding shareholder, because he was initially based on some of my music work. But they're going to go full on gaming. So I assume these business people, they know what they're doing. And I mean, given the size of the industry of gaming, it's, it's so obvious and, and like, like the CTO, there is a guy who's been doing quantum games his whole life. Very smart guy, a good friend of mine. And clearly something's going to happen there. But I'm sort of just in the same way as Refik was talking about uncertainty. To me, it's not very clear exactly where quantum is going to go first, because we don't know. We don't know we were still like arguing about which hardware is going to break through. Maybe it's going to be all of them. And depending on the hardware, you may have different applications. 

For example, some of the hardware is very noisy, which can be very useful for certain artistic application. Other hardware just doesn't exist, like photonics, light. We were earlier talking about light. I mean, I would love to see a quantum computer based on light. All the big experiments in quantum were all based on light, like Zeilinger in Vienna, when he did teleportation, all of things, it was all light. The Bell test, it was all light. There is no, I mean, Quandela in France, they have, they have a bit of a quantum computer with light, but we haven't seen a big, scaled one. And light is the future of humanity, and it's the past of humanity and it's the present of humanity.  

Dr Kris Naudts Nice, nicely put. 

Refik Anadol 35:45 Totally, totally agree. I mean, I mean, is it like the light is? I don't know how. I don't I couldn't find a better material than light in in the universe that, you know, has a particle, wavelength, spiritual. I mean, it has all type of, you know, values for humanity, right? And we need to survive, I guess, every day.  

Bob Coecke 36:05 So we get light from the other side of the universe, and it arrives here in perfect condition. 

Dr Kris Naudts 36:12 One of the things we also talked about before is indeed degenerate art, as the Nazis labeled cubistic art and other experimental forms. Is this something with the way that the current kind of political climate is going, that we will see quantum art labeled as, can you see such a future that it would be banned, too spooky for comfort?  

Bob Coecke 36:38 I mean, I would say, I mean, from my view on quantum art, like say it's about relationalism. So it is comfort. It's not bad for comfort. It's exactly comfort. It's like people. I mean, what? So I'm going back to the experiment we did with the with the teenagers, the 15 year olds, is better than the 18 year olds. Why? Because naturally, we are relational beings. We relate ourselves to other things. We relate itself to each other. The way we think about the most very basic needs is, I relate myself to food. I relate myself to this. So it's all about the relations. Then we get like thought science and the way, going back to my previous story, is that we break things down into pieces, and we go to this very reductionist and atomistic way of thinking about the world, and we lose this sort of relational field. And that's why I think that the 15 year old did better than the 18 year old, because they knew less. They had less to unlearn. 

Bob Coecke 37:44  I don't see any danger in quantum personally. I don't think it's, I mean, I don't, I mean, the spooky thing is like, so some philosophy thing. I don't think it's dangerous. I think it can solve things. So in my slightly less artistic work. So to say, I'm using quantum to make AI more responsible and interpretable and understandable and all of that. So quantum can be a pathway to actually get away from the sort of stuff that makes AI scary. 

Dr Kris Naudts 38:20 Couldn't agree more Refik, any thoughts on that? 

Refik Anadol 38:22 I think, I think in general, this is like a part that I felt that where art can be this, I guess education, learning, I guess this making an invisible, visible context, right? I mean, as a material, again, I just had to come. It's a very inspiring topic that what we discussed, right, how light can become this, liberated from all the like, you know, behaviors of a pigment or a marble or a bronze, or like all the things that has been used for manifesting, and, you know, the mind's eye of an artist or a create, creative mind, but with, I think, Quantum context, and in possible, possibly many breakthroughs around it. I mean, maybe a different analogy. But I just want to share this feeling. So if you think about a, let's say traditional or conventional artist working with a pigment, with a brush, with a canvas. I mean, for for many, many decades, these didn't change, right? The idea changed, the expression change. But from my inner voice AI or quantum computation and physics, every single day feels like a new day. And the idea of reimagining the art making and creativity and many other manifestations of, you know, human minds and intellectual world, and it's just every day is a new day feeling that there's nothing fixed anymore, and that is this feeling of ever changingness and of course, and time and space perception most likely will change when things are more quantified and observed. I mean, and this all happening in our lifetime, like, I don't know the joy of this, the inspiring side of this gratefulness to be alive, I guess, in this reality, and it's this feeling so to answer, I know it's not a direct answer, but it's, it's a very, very inspiring time to be alive, to witness one of the most inspiring time of humanity I think. 

Dr Kris Naudts 40:24 I agree. I agree, and you're in a great spot to observe it, where you're currently based, of course, and we can't complain either here in London? Although I don't know to what extent quantum is thriving outside of Western societies without deep academic ecosystems? 

Bob Coecke 40:42  I mean, just going back to the 70s, people were relating to quantum, to Buddhism, to a lot of in stuff in India. And so there was this sort of, let's say hippie, hippie connect. I mean, I wouldn't say the Buddhism is a hippy connection. But so for example, I've been teaching my graphical language in Africa, in Ghana and then some other countries. So that's the visual language, which is about connecting quantum scenes explicitly visually. And it's clear that nonwestern cultures tend to relate easier to that than Western cultures, exactly for the same reason I said before, this reductionist thinking, this, this sort of static thinking for for us. So let's, going back to philosophy like Parmenides. This the way we have we make a film like with frames. That's his view on reality. That's a view on reality. Physics as adopted. The way you be taught physics is you get kinematics static, and it's also for quantum mechanics, and then the way you go from one frame to the next one, that's how you learn physics, not that there is like a flow or a process going on. And this process ideas, they are much stronger in non western cultures, in several non western cultures. So to some extent, and I've had this belief that that this new, the real quantum thinking, actually could be advantageous in countries, like in Asia and Africa, and then, yes, I mean, that's also the response I've been getting from them. So there could be some sort of inclusivity, diversity aspect to going quantum, and getting a little bit way from like the Western dominance. So to say, so I'm actually answering your previous question now about the whether it's dangerous or not…  

Bob Coecke 42:47 because it's dangerous to some, I guess, in that sense, but, but, and this sort of process, ideas flow, ideas, I don't, they're not that new. They're inside of us. This is our thinking. So I think what quantum did, is to bring the positive sciences, the exact sciences by force in a space where the humanities were actually, were always have been, but the humanities don't have the right mathematical tools, and that's why they just use statistics. So I can imagine that quantum science can actually bring tools to humanities about how our brain works, like in a very deep conceptual way, maybe even consciousness, things like that. And there's quite a lot of work, a lot of work has been done on basically connecting our thinking to certain quantum structures, because it's more it's closer to human reality than break chopping up things in pieces. Well, humans like to chop up things in pieces, to be honest but okay. 

Refik Anadol 44:03 From the artist and education, maybe perspective like I felt that there's an incredible bright side of things when it comes to exhibitions in public space with breakthroughs. I felt that in Serpentine Gallery show we had in London, for example, just an example of a different, maybe context. But I felt that the exhibition open was four weeks, and we hosted 90,000 people, and there was approximately, I mean, Michael Bloomberg, personally, like email, mail, like physically and saying that it's the first time in 20 something year I saw in an exhibition at six months, you're six months old and 96 years old at the same time in the same condition. I feel like the power of art through science and technology has a super powerful way of like, bringing people together. And I think this sometimes, like, very important, because there's a chance of the focus topic. Of life. Again, science, in this case, quantum science, I mean, like any form of science, and same for art, very, very high art, that is like, maybe niche for group of people, respect all of this, but I feel that art could just be for anyone and everyone, and that can generate these new ways of communicating in a public space,  that unfold things that are hard to understand, and instead of like siloed like Lecture Series or, you know, long PDFs or lecture series. And I hope that AI also can be a helpful translator of life, that even the hardest topics could be explained and explored in a simpler way, that society doesn't feel that I am out from this it's too much for me, or it's I don't have the background or intellectual context of life. So I feel it is an incredible thing for art, I hope that generates common grounds for life and doing it safe and I guess, ethical and happy places for humanity, right? And, of course, the schools, and I mean, academia is doing this, of course, but there's a one more layer in academia, right? There are, there are walls to reach a success for a person to attend the school and so forth. Those barriers makes me sometimes nervous for for a public artist, because when I interact with a person on a street, I don't think about those borders, I don't think about CVs, I don't think about GPAs. Don't think about like attribution of a paper or so forth. It's life, and that's where I felt that maybe art is this translator of life. Can bring us together without all this bias, all these like layers of life, simplifying with respect, 

Dr Kris Naudts 46:47 No absolutely. And one of the examples of what you do to bring, indeed, art, really, to the world and to everybody, was your project with Lionel Messi, for example, nobody in the conventional art world would readily do that, and it speaks volumes that you did that, and I think you reached into corners of the world that would otherwise be impossible to reach. 

Refik Anadol 47:09  Definitely, I've been very grateful, and also, like, very grateful point of that, like the thing that I felt that, I mean, I don't know if it's true to say this, but I feel like with all this technology we have now, right? I mean, that is everyday, getting better and better. I feel like there is another language for humanity that we don't know yet, right. Now language is like humanity just distributed into like cultures and countries. But I feel like there is a world that could be invented, explored, explained, shared, and my really inner voice and dream from my heart is finding that language of humanity, and that is not like maybe a language we know, that we perceive. Maybe it's a different form of material that doesn't exist yet. Maybe there's a world that is spirituality, science and technology, having new ways of saying something that we don't know yet, and I'm just excited about that positive places that really connects us, just allows us to remind us that we are just one society and humanity in there, we just needed borders and walls and cultures to just simplify understanding life, and maybe later we learn that these are just basic understanding of life. So that's an ultimate I hope this statement will give us this vision, and that we don't have it yet. 

Dr Kris Naudts 48:35  No, no, no, exactly. Politics would be great if you would explore that next Refik. 

Refik Anadol 48:  I mean…  I'd be happy to! 

Dr Kris Naudts 48:44  If you have to think. And the same for you. Bob, I mean, what would be a dream collaboration for you? If you could pick a person to do a project with to to meet your goals? What would that be?  

Bob Coecke 48: 58 Oh, dear. Probably Heraclitus, if I can say something, but I’d like to also elaborate on the language issue, because, because there are big barriers between us and it's, it's, it's the fundamental structure of meaning, be it artistic meaning, be it meaning as we speak, meaning as we conceive, be it meaning as being scientifically, doesn't live in a line. It doesn't live on a line and and so much problems Refik was referring to come, come from that we humans can only communicate on a line, one world after another. Well, the fundamental structure is higher dimension. I mean, it's something I've specifically worked on, and that's the sort of structure where you see the visual, the images, the light, come together with the sound, and come together with our thoughts. They all come together in this sort of higher dimensional space. Which, which I've been working, and I want to work more on and I think just by being smarter about these things, we all can become happier, and we can all become better friends, because I think so much stuff results that now I'm going to go back to the ancient Greeks, but different ancient Greeks, not the pre Socratics, but Aristotle. 

Bob Cocke 50:24 Of course, it's an amazing thing, the way he formulated logic and stuff like that. But that sort of logic is what politicians use and used to actually be wrong about things and be messing with our heads and stuff like that. So we need to find some higher sort of logic. And my inspiration there comes from music and from movies and visual representation, while I'm actually doing the science too. So it's the other direction.  

Refik Anadol 50:54 And I mean, it's a great question, and I remember again, 10 years ago, when I got my residency for the for this AI research, AI residence at Google team. They asked me, like, okay, similar, like, what will be like this dream collaboration with type of like, you know, scientists. And I said, you know, if we sit together with an AI engineer, most likely in a couple of minutes later, everything turns very mathematical context, but perhaps in a room that we have AI scientist, we have neuroscientists, we have artists, but maybe also Shaman and someone that brings the other wisdom of the world that we don't quantify yet, but there's ancestral wisdom of life that we don't have a book yet, a movie yet, a PDF yet. And that's like, the diversity of the time. I'm so excited when we just dream with with people together. And also I have this, like, you know, like, I mean, if you can basically use quantum computing right to cure disease or, like, solve climate change, I think we must also use it to expand our imagination. And I feel like this is the idea of a VR like remembering a future that we haven't lived yet, right? That is incredible feeling. And I wish that I can collaborate with someone on the field that really this idea of remembering the future as a form of art can be a fascinating place to be.  

Dr Kris Naudts 52:20 Yeah, super interesting. Now, Bob and I, as you, as you know, we are both originally Belgian. We both live in the UK, but we're originally Belgian, and Brussels is a city very dear to our heart, poorly understood city, a city where 40% of people live under the poverty threshold, and then the other 60% live very far above that poverty threshold. It's a Baltimore in Europe, if you like, an awkward combination for a city. Now, as it happens, the principles of quantum physics were first announced to the world in 1927 at the so called Solvay Conference, which is the most prestigious physics conference in the world, and they took place in Brussels. So 1927 is probably the most famous one, and it has a very famous picture going with it of the 27 attendance, of which 22 were already or became Nobel Prize winners. So it was a fantastic occasion, of course, long forgotten, but in a year from today, this will be 100 years ago, and we would love to organise something in Brussels to actually celebrate this centenary. And it would be amazing, Refik, if we could get some artistic input from you. It would be fantastic if you could recreate that picture. Can you imagine?  

Refik Anadol 53:41 We'll be honored, and we'll be happy to imagine together. 

Dr Kris Naudts 53:43 That would be, that would be wonderful. We have the Automium as well, which is the iron crystal that was put there for the Expo 58 so it would be wonderful to shine a beautiful light on Quantum.  

Bob Coecke 53:55 I can only agree how underrated Brussels is, it’s an amazing city.  

Dr Kris Naudts 54:01 Have you visited Refik? 

Refik Anadol 54:03  Yes. And actually, I have a show in Bruges coming in, I think in May 

Dr Kris Naudts 45:08 Oh fantastic. Oh, we'll take you to Brussels, 

Refik Anadol 54:10 Please. That would be amazing. I will definitely stop by and and so happy to be there soon. 

Dr Kris Naudts 54:17 Wonderful. Thank you so much, both of you. I truly enjoyed this. It was a privilege to be in the same room with both of you and I hope to talk again soon, offline 

Refik Anadol 54:26 Thank you so much for invitation. Have a great day.  

Bob Coecke 54:27 Thank you.  

Dr Kris Naudts 59:29 Thank you, Bob. Take care. 

ENDS