Audiovisual installation Spooky action

An exploratory study of GPS synchronization of autonomous devices

Abstract

This work explores through an audiovisual installation how research through design, centered on artistic expression and where technology emerges in dialogue with the creative process, can offer new ways of understanding and communicating abstract quantum phenomena such as spooky action at a distance (quantum entanglement) and wave-particle duality. The installation consists of autonomous, GPS-synchronized nodes that with almost perfect temporal precision cooperate with each other to create a concrete yet perceptually inaccessible site- and time-specific sensory experience. The work adopts an interdisciplinary approach integrating the design of the artistic expression with the development of the media technology. This holistic process has proven highly effective, generating multifaceted results. The functional prototypes developed not only demonstrate the artwork’s ability to render quantum mechanical phenomena, but also reveal the technology’s potential for building and studying phase-coherent systems and the limits of temporal perception, offer a new model for distributed synchronized systems in the media industry, and propose the concept of conceptual synchresis, to explain an intellectual, non sensory experience of simultaneity.