Hello Reader, This newsletter turned 1 year old! 🎉 It grew so fast: started by putting some words together on a clunky notion todo list, and now here we are. A dozen issues in, that can all be reviewed here, having a steady 80%+ open rate, and a couple dozen subscribers (true fans by Conte's measures?), things are looking good here. Timing has been a bit off sometimes - like for this one, lol. A reminder of what I can not control? Perhaps. But it may as well be the result of running a news editorial office of just one man -whose main job is not news reporting. Originally, I did think (naively) that it could quickly become an outlet to share work by many other people - which it still does in a way, through the many different collaborations I am involved with. But then along came the Community. project whose open forum is a much better format for collective sharing, as well as more strictly focussed on QC and Art. Still, this OCH's newsletter, as it stands, allows me to share a different perspective/context, and grants a different type of freedom - who's to say that this intro text must always be shorter than the rest of the newsletter anyway, or that it must be exclusively in english 😄? I like to experiment, as you can probably tell by now, and so I will continue to do so into this second year of newslettering. Please join me in this little celebration, counting photons, or flipping coins, and feel free to bring a friend. EVENTSTalk at ISTAs previously mentioned, I had a talk in the Physics Department of IST (Instituto Superior Técnico), in Lisbon, on April 22nd. This talk, titled From Computer Music To Quantum Computing, included an overview of what it means to use computers in music and how I ended up on my quest to define Quantum-computing Aided Composition (QAC). Though very shortly announced (on twitter, like I had predicted), the Physics Seminar room was packed! It was wonderful to interact with such diverse and enthusiastic group, from young students to older professors, and answer some very interesting questions. This talk was also part of the World Quantum Day celebrations, that is technically on April 14, but has events happening from March 14, until May 14 - no pun intended, or is it ;)
SOFTWAREa coinflip app
On April 18, I attended an event called Quantum@School at a lovely Gulbenkian auditorium. This event was organized by PQI, Portuguese Quantum Institute (more on that in a future newsletter), and its REQ "network of quantum schools" that brings together high schools in Portugal and other Portuguese speaking countries. At this event there was a talk by Yasser Omar about quantum internet and its applications. It included a good deal of nice puns, as well as some serious commentary on geopolitical strategies and ideas.
One very captivating moment, for that audience of high schoolers, was when Yasser invited a member from the audience to do an experiment: a classical coin flip! The idea was to prove that the result of flipping two classical coins was not correlated. And then he explained what would happen if we had two entangled quantum coins. I thought that the interactive and performative moment was so engaging that I wondered if there could be something else, also interactive, to help explain an entangled quantum coin-flip.
That night, I wrote a webapp: coinflip.quantumland.art. A simple classical coin-flip app, until you switch a toggle that "turns it into a quantum coin" - in fact, a rigged coin that returns the same result for consecutive coin-flips of other online users. Of course devices are not really quantum entangled, and thus it is possible to break the illusion, but for slow consecutive coin-flips the correlation will be noticeable. So the jury is still out on this one: is it a helpful tool, amusing, or just confusing? Go ahead and give it a try with a friend (or 2 devices you own, or 2 browser tabs...). CREATIVE WORKResidency at QuTe Lab
From April 15 to 24 I had the pleasure to be the first artist in residence at QuTe Lab, the new Quantum Technologies Lab at IST. I've been an active advocate for quantum computing (QC), but this was a new kind of challenge for me - working much closer to the hardware, and at a lower level. Programming a quantum computer is one thing - and something that I am committed to make accessible for creative artists -, but building a quantum computer is an entirely different thing. If you've attended any of my workshops or talks on QC, or started exploring QC on your own, this may look familiar:
A quantum circuit, composed of quantum gates. These gates can be of various kinds, and combined in different ways - to create algorithms. Ultimately, each qubit gets measured (the black boxes at the far right). And if this is always taken for granted, that qubits get measured, the measuring apparatus in itself is anything but trivial. As one of my great CompSci professors once said: "that's an engineering problem, please don't ask me how it works exactly haha".
And so, between school visits, unplanned events, and lunch meetings, I dedicated some time making sense of measuring photons, and building interfaces, among other things. During my stay at QuTe Lab, I also had the pleasure to interact quite a bit with Preeti Yadav, the lab manager and researcher, and a theorist turned experimentalist. And of course, many thanks to Yasser Omar for the invitation, and the opportunity to interact with, and be a part of, such a nice group :)
40th Bandcamp Friday
This next friday, May 3rd, Bandcamp will host its 40th Bandcamp Friday. This is a monthly event (but not all months) where 100% of the funds from purchases in its platform go directly to the artists. It's a great day to find new music and share some love by directly supporting it. I have been growing my own public collection myself, and I also have some albums of my own on Bandcamp. Celebrating, with a pamplemousse poubelle hat, |