Quantum LOGOS (vision serpent)

Mark Chavez, Ina Conradi-Chavez, and Tate Egon Chavez

Medium: Classic Design, Intuitive Design, and Technical Animation (2018-2022)
Issues: Decolonizing Quantum Mechanics

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Project Links

Description

Quantum LOGOS (vision serpent) is an immersive reactive film that uses Mesoamerican culture as inspiration for design ideas used to explore quantum mechanics basics. This project uses abstract animated imagery to metaphorically represent the quantum world. This approach is employed because of the parallels that are evident in the art and philosophy of Mesoamerica to the quantum mechanics vision of the nature of reality. While focusing on Young’s Double Slit Experiment, how light behaves when passed through double slits, as part of this project research, additional inspiration was found in the Observer Effect. These two phenomena are core issues relevant to this artwork and which are used to explain quantum mechanics. New ideas are presented through the ancient artistic interpretation of natural wonders to attest to their intuitive assumptions’ timeless beauty and similarity to current notions. By using designs that are rooted in ideas embraced by Mesoamerican thought, Quantum Logos (vision serpent) includes a series of visual metaphors that explore, discover, and communicate the counterintuitive and contradictory beauty of nature.

This immersive, reactive, animated piece is counter to a pedantic infomercial that would graphically explain Quantum Theory. Instead, it conveys the awe that the artists felt when studying questions like, “What is the nature of existence as determined by science? while interpreting it with Meso-American design styles. The use of a visual language recalls abstract painters’ approaches based on science’s emergent ideas. The work is not tainted with iconography but rather with feelings expressed as moving abstract paintings. Quantum Logos (vision serpent) is inspired by many artists who have used these approaches in the past such as Roberto Matta, Hokusai, Dalí, and Henry Moore, among others, who have used ideas inspired by Quantum Theory to inform their artwork. A main motivator was their ability to blend classic compositional forms to imply meaning.

Finally, Quantum Logos (vision serpent) is relevant to the artist’s Mexican cultural background, emphasizing newly established links to scientific phenomena. However, without the desire to appropriate cultural icons that, with our current scientifically informed culture, we can hardly begin to understand in purpose, intent, and historical context. My current research looks at how diffusion-based generative image creation techniques influence the themes of my exploration in visual and animation design.

Prior Showings:
Ars Electronica Festival Linz. AU. 2022 Deep Space 8k theater

Raw Science Film Festival. Los Angeles, CA .2019

Media Art Nexus, NTU Singapore. 2021

Fission: The New Wave of International Digital Art – Guizhou Provincial Museum. 2022

Bio

Mark Chavez is an award-winning animator, artist, educator and entrepreneur who has developed systems and techniques for animation in many different media, including laser light at LaserMedia Inc., on Symbolics systems in broadcast television at Tokyo Broadcasting System (1990), and PlayStation games at Acclaim Entertainment (1994). Recruited by DreamWorks SKG (1995), he worked on visual effects for a number of their fully animated films. At the original Rhythm and Hues Studios in Playa Vista (2002), Mark worked on visual effects for numerous big-budget, award-winning live-action films. Animation industry veteran and founding faculty at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media’s Digital Animation area, Mark set up an animation research think-tank funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) in Singapore and the Media Development Authority of Singapore. He has several award-winning animated short films that have screened at numerous international film festivals. Mark artistic practice strives to utilize digital multimedia techniques to tag visual meaning to tangible, recognizable ideas. He explores computer animation and emotive-abstraction, matching design to emotions, as based on previous academic research in audio-driven motion and real-time animation design at the Nanyang Technological University Singapore. His work currently attempts to shape a design sense of a live, anthropomorphic world view to a contemporary scientific view. He exhibits his artwork as interactive, immersive fields, short films, and print

Ina Conradi-Chavez has been Associate Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University (2007 till present), living and working in Singapore since 2005. She was presented with of the Koh Boon Hwee Scholars Award (2015) and the Nanyang Education Award 2014 (School) for recognition to the influence of inspirational teaching at the NTU Singapore. For the last five years, she has been curating a large media platform (Media Art Nexus) in the public site in Singapore for exhibiting and teaching in the field of urban digital placemaking and media architecture. In collaboration with universities worldwide, she has enabled students to produce site-specific audio-visual media content that thematically and spatially interacts with its surroundings and augments the space. Ina presented and exhibited her works at the UCLA Art|Sci Center +Lab, Ars Electronica Festival, Beyond Festival ZKM Germany, Media Architecture Biennial Beijing and Amsterdam, SGIO Tokyo, ISEA, 67th Edinburgh International Film Festival, Women 3D directors Paramount, FMX Stuttgart, Siggraph Asia, ISEA and many others. Her most recent Ministry of Education Singapore-awarded research project (2021-23) is in experimental art/sci animation – an aesthetic experiment describing the fundamental questions raised by Quantum Theory about the very nature of reality.

Tate Egon Chavez, composer and multi-instrumentalist, explores the intimacy of unconventional sounds with his compositions for new media and film. During and since completion of undergraduate studies in music and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, he has designed soundscapes for works featured in festivals internationally, including Singapore Inside Out: Tokyo(2017), Ars Electronica Deep Space 8K (2016, 19, 21), and the Raw Science Film Festival (2020). With a background in classical performance and modern production techniques, Chavez’s compositions play with distinctions of traditional and contemporary. He is currently based in Los Angeles.