The Beginning
travelling to who knows where
watch your back
an accident waiting to happen
individuation
death is inevitable
Quantum Many-Worlds Theory and Artistic Interpretation
Quantum Many-Worlds Theory
These artworks are inspired by the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, a theory associated with Hugh Everett’s 1957 “relative-state” formulation. In broad terms, the theory suggests that all possible outcomes of a quantum event may continue to exist, not as unrealised possibilities, but as different branches of a larger universal wavefunction.
Although quantum physics describes behaviour at the microscopic level, the philosophical implications of Many-Worlds have often been imagined on a much larger, human scale. In this interpretation, measurement does not collapse reality into a single outcome. Instead, the different possible outcomes are understood as continuing in separate branches. The observer and the observed become entangled within those branches, with each version experiencing its own outcome as real.
The parallel universe in these images features three figures: a young girl, a young man and an older woman. They are variations of the same person, imagined across different worlds. They move through related experiences, but at different moments and with different consequences. There may be no original and no copy; only versions, each real within the world that contains them.
Surveillance and Quantum Many-Worlds Theory
Surveillance and Many-Worlds theory are not the same thing, but they share a fascination with observation and consequence. In surveillance, being watched can alter behaviour. In quantum theory, measurement is bound up with the state of the system being measured. In both cases, observation is not neutral.
The rectangles on each face suggest that the figures are being watched, recorded or measured. Yet the identity of the observer remains uncertain. Is it another person, a system, the viewer, or the self looking back from another possible world?
Filmmaking and Quantum Many-Worlds Theory
Film offers another way to think about branching realities. Narratives often turn on “what if” moments: a different choice, a different cut, a different sequence of events. Alternate storylines, parallel timelines and multiple versions of the same character all echo, metaphorically, the idea of reality dividing into different possible outcomes.
Films such as The Matrix and Inception question the stability of perception and the reliability of the world as it appears to us. The film-like negatives in these works suggest that reality may not be fixed, singular or fully knowable. What we see may be only one frame, one version, one exposure among many.
Artistic Interpretation
Each world in this body of work reflects a variation on experiences from my own life, and the imagined repercussions those experiences might have had elsewhere. What if the timing had been different? What if I had made another choice? What if I had become another version of myself?
These artworks invite the viewer to question reality, identity and authorship. They ask what it means to be observed, what it means to choose, and whether the self is singular, or made up of all the possible selves that might have existed beyond the limits of our own observation.
Sources
Hugh Everett III, “Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” Reviews of Modern Physics 29 (1957): 454–462.
Lev Vaidman, “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 2002, revised 2021.
Jeffrey A. Barrett, “Everett’s Relative-State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014.
David Wallace, “Decoherence and Ontology, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love FAPP,” 2011.
Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1975.
Roger Clarke, “Information Technology and Dataveillance,” Communications of the ACM 31, no. 5 (1988): 498–512.
Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Jan Simons, “Complex Narratives,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 6, no. 2 (2008): 111–126.
Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, “Possible Selves,” American Psychologist 41, no. 9 (1986): 954–969.
Kai Epstude and Neal J. Roese, “The Functional Theory of Counterfactual Thinking,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 12, no. 2 (2008): 168–192.
