Quantum Research Group



About QR Group —

Quantum Research Group (QRG) is an initiative of the artist Hrvoje Hiršl, in collaboration with the Institute of Physics in Zagreb, Croatia. Its aim is to research and develop alternative operational models, enabling resources to explore, question, and utilize emerging technologies in quantum optics and quantum computing in a non-recursive and creative way, thus preparing us for their implementation in the coming decades.

We believe in breaking down the arbitrary boundaries between disciplines and in merging Art, Science & Technology into one exploratory journey.

Projects 

This initiative started with two light installations (The Collapse & Exceptional point) and extended into The Politics of Numbers, visualizations of quantum processes based on the entangled photons.


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Light installations





Exceptional point —

Exceptional point is a light installation based on quantum optics. It questions the properties of reality. An Exceptional point is the point in which the system begins to manifest properties that haven’t been there until recently. It is a transition from a characteristic, base state to an exotic state, a crossing into up to now unknown, sensitive balance between phases, characteristics that did not exist, but subsequently appeared.



Questions of the appearance and the characteristics of the system are increasingly important, and are part of our everyday life - constant fluctuations without a stable form, sudden changes without a fixed state. At the moment when formal properties are lost and replaced on demand, what stays characteristic? What is authentic, when what we see is no longer what it is?




The Collapse —
“The Collapse” is a part of the “The Limit of Representation” exhibition project, aiming to make visible parts of reality that are beyond human experience. The project started in 2019, in collaboration with Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, in Garching, Germany. In collaboration with Dr. Neven Šantić the scientist from MPI, the artist developed a light installation based on the double slit experiment. The output of the experiment is usually of a small scale, but for installation purposes it has been scaled up to the limits of what is physically possible, thus projecting it in a much larger format.

The double slit experiment demonstrates the wave function collapse. If a photon passes through the two slits undisturbed it will behave as a wave and form an interference pattern. If we measure through which of the two slits it passes it behaves as a particle, implying that our reality is undetermined until it is observed. The result of the experiment depends on the observer. It is meant to connect the quantum scale to the human scale, bringing us closer to the parts of reality that we can’t normally observe.