Sensing the Multiverse: the Magic of Quantum Physics and Prehistoric Cave Art

Here I reflect on my journey to Sulawesi, Indonesia, where I experienced the magic of ancient cave paintings. I contemplate the similarities between the the mystery of the paintings’ histories and my interest in non-representation quantum artwork.

In July, I traveled to see the world’s oldest representational artworks – the ancient cave paintings of hands and pigs, which date from between 51,200 and 45,000 years old. These are located in South Sulawesi, an island in East Indonesia, displacing the West as the site of abstract thought and story-telling in early humans.

It was incredible, beyond words really!

This research was funded by the British Council in partnership with Museum MACAN, Jakarta as part of UNESCO’s Year of Quantum Science and Technology.

If you’ve been following my writing from this past year, you’ll know I’m interested in the limits of visual representation, as genuine quantum computer art will lead us beyond representation to a type of non-human, entangled awareness. There we may sense a pulsating, shapeshifting field where unfamiliar magical ontologies can penetrate our being.

Like our underlying quantum reality, the “true” ancient realm behind the cave art is inaccessible to us. When we were in the caves, trying to grasp the object behind the image, we had so many unanswerable questions, felt a million sensations, constructed multiple undoubtedly erroneous myths and tunnelled through multiple temporalities all at once.

But like quantum reality, the ancient world is inconceivable to us.

The caves themselves are like the inside of a quantum computer: cold and dark and isolated from the outside world. They are both portals for the spiritual and sacred.

Both caves and quantum suggest alternative ways of being and invite us to embrace uncertainty.

For instance, I calculated that roughly 2,000 generations of humans would have lived since the first cave paintings were made 51,200 years ago. Here in our contemporary world, we cannot fathom how different their society and culture was to ours. The prehistoric cave paintings re-contextualise the present moment and open up new imaginaries, while teaching us to slow down.

Other cave paintings were dated at 45,000 years old, yet still depicted the same images: stencils of hands and line-drawn pigs. The hunter-gatherers’ culture was remarkably stable over at least 6 millennia. This sort of time scale, I simply cannot wrap my head around.

Likewise, the active cave of Leang Tedongnge was still growing, reaching to touch its inhabitants at a speed of 1mm every hundred years. These rocky surfaces are slimy and fluid on geological times.

Therefore, how can the magic of quantum physics and prehistoric cave art help contemporary humans remember what we have lost?

Probing the limits of representation is important as images fix things, creating object-subject boundaries, which lead to various modes of domination and control. We see this most clearly through digital technologies like social media, which suck our attention and nudge our behaviours for profit. Future quantum technologies will certainly extend this and this is why its crucial to imagine alternatives.

How can art help us experience a world without representation to move beyond these image-based times?

Stay tuned over the coming months and years for future outcomes based on this research.