Aaron Dantuma

Emergence Delft:
The poetry of complex technology

A Delft student team is creating art installations in order to give more insight into cool and relevant technology.

Technology is sometimes so complex that only true insiders can make sense of it. Others - read: society - then shrug their shoulders: whatever. This is not good, Emergence Delft thinks, because technology is far too important for that. The Dream Team bridges the gap between complicated technical science and society by using art as a universal language.

'We operate at the interface between art, technology and science,' says Gijs van der Kerk, who studies architecture at Delft University of Technology. 'As students at a TU, we sometimes miss the artistic side of technology a bit. While that is precisely what offers an opportunity to better highlight the complex technologies being developed here.'

Emergence Delft

  • Number of members: 32
  • Established: 2023
  • Purpose: To bring art, technology design and science together in a unique experience
  • Mission: to convey complex technology to a wide audience

Architectural perspective

Every semester, a new Emergence Delft team of 32 students from both TU Delft and nearby art schools work on an art installation. As chief concept, Van der Kerk was part of the team focusing on quantum technology.

On the basis of what is going on in society and what research is taking place at TU Delft, the team members determine which new technology is not only relevant 'but which can also make for a fat art installation,' says Van der Kerk, who was initially not too familiar with quantum technology. 'That's exactly what makes it fun. Apart from my curiosity, I also brought an architectural eye.'

Information boards in Japanese

The result was Coexist, an installation that was at the Mauritshuis in The Hague earlier this year and then moved to the main train station of Osaka in Japan, the city where the World Expo is currently taking place. 'Everyone can experience Coexist there, even without a ticket,' says Famke Gerritsen, who does operations on behalf of the team. Science communicators are on standby around the work, providing further explanations if required. 'And we have placed info boards next to it,' says Gerritsen. 'Also in Japanese, of course.'

Indeed,Coexist does not immediately reveal all its secrets. It is an installation with a sphere at its centre that diffuses white light, in all wavelengths. 'An analogy with what in the quantum world is called a superposition: that something is in multiple states at the same time,' says Van der Kerk. The white light passes through two polarising filters and through sugar water.

That way, the white light turns into a specific colour. 'That depicts another important principle in quantum, the measurement problem.' That concerns the conundrum that measuring the wave function affects the wave function itself and the measurement result. Even if a particle is in superposition of different quantum states, a measurement will yield only one state.

Quantumcorrect

Through the installation with polarising colour filters and sugar water, anyone can now experience how something can exist in superposition: as the ball of light in the centre, with filters around it representing the different observations with colours. Only by walking around it does the viewer, including King Willem-Alexander when he visited the World Expo, realise that what appears white is made up of many different kinds of light.

A physicist specialising in quantum technology had been added to the team especially for the project, explains Van der Kerk. 'His job was to make sure we stayed "quantum correct" and did not get too poetic.'

Simple metaphors

Indeed, there is a risk that translating technology or a scientific theory into an art installation oversimplifies or even violates reality. The team members are aware of this. 'We don't want to explain a technology too romantically, with simple metaphors,' says Van der Kerk. 'As a team from a technical university, we should not sell nonsense.'

Over the summer, Coexist moved from the railway station to the World Expo site itself. The team is now still looking for a post-World Expo location, just as previous installations continued to 'live' after the students directly involved made way for their successors. The World Expo runs until October.

Woven fabric

Now that Coexist is out in the world, team members are focusing on two next projects. The New Media Project explores how synthetic cells are changing our view of life. The art installation should not only make the technology more accessible, but also help open the conversation about the ethical, social and ecological questions surrounding the creation of life.

Input comes, among others, from Professor of Biophysics Cees Dekker's group that is trying to breathe life into inanimate material. A second project is related to this: that explores if and when textiles become more than woven fabric and perhaps even something alive or connected to us. How do we interact with our clothes and materials?

In September, projects around water ('The Power of Water') and film. In the latter, the team will work with neuroscientists to explore new ways of storytelling ('Film x Neuroscience')

As a startup

For the team members, meanwhile, it is mainly six months of hard work. a Dream Team is sometimes compared to a start-up and that is how I experience it too,' says Gerritsen. 'We also have to manage the budget all by ourselves by looking for investors.'

TU Delft provides a working space. 'We are also allowed to use TU machines, which is useful for manufacturing the installations, and the university offers training, for working with specific machines but also for dealing with media, for example,' Gerritsen says.

For Gerritsen, the main reason for becoming a team member was content anyway. 'Technology is becoming increasingly important. If no one understands it yet, how do we as a society decide what we want to do with it?'

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