Roadmap to Quantum Aesthetics

TL;DR

This paper explores how quantum concepts can be transformed into aesthetic experiences through artistic mediation, using AI-generated texts and visualizations of quantum data to shape a new field of quantum aesthetics.

Contribution

It introduces a dual approach combining AI-driven cultural analysis and quantum data visualization to pioneer the emerging field of quantum aesthetics.

Findings

Quantum imaginaries circulate within visual culture.

AI models reveal cultural perceptions of quantum concepts.

Quantum data visualizations produce novel aesthetic forms.

Abstract

Quantum mechanics occupies a central position in contemporary science while remaining largely inaccessible to direct sensory experience. This paper proposes a roadmap to quantum aesthetics that examines how quantum concepts become aesthetic phenomena through artistic mediation rather than direct representation. Two complementary and orthogonal approaches are articulated. The first, a pioneering top-down approach, employs text-prompt-based generative AI to probe quantum aesthetics as a collective cultural construct embedded in large-scale training data. By systematically modulating the linguistic weight of the term "quantum," generative models are used as experimental environments to reveal how quantum imaginaries circulate within contemporary visual culture. The second, a bottom-up approach, derives aesthetic form directly from quantum-mechanical structures through the visualization of quantum-generated data, exemplified here by hydrogen atomic orbitals calculated from the Schr\"odinger equation. These approaches are framed not as competing methods but as intersecting paths within a navigable field of artistic research. They position quantum aesthetics as an emergent field of artistic research shaped by cultural imagination, computational mediation, and physical law, opening new directions for artistic practice and pedagogy at the intersection of art, data, artificial intelligence and quantum science.