It was the crack of dawn, and I was going a buck twenty down the Gardiner Expressway. Still groggy from a late night of drafting the next marking plan. I crack the window, turn up Graceland and reflect on the Creation, Production and Dissemination of the Arts.
We were on route to Kitchener, westbound and down. To 10 King St., or as they like to be called, The Museum! The trees ran past us waving goodbye as we exit the GTA via the 401, dodging the building congestion.
The building’s entrance was astounding four storeys up an elliptical skylight greeted us with a bath of light, illuminating landings and staircases leading all the way up the building. A living wall, and pit of soft building blocks surround us on ground floor we lost ourselves in the sights and sounds for a moment.
Eventually, the rest of the crew roll in. Fifteen of us gathered for a private tour, plus a few individuals including one of THE MUSEUM’s board members, after a few words about the exhibit we were ready to take on the advent of Quantum, the reality of our future.
We were lead in by Martin Laforest, senior manager of scientific outreach at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC). He explained a bit about what we were about to see; information, mechanics, interactive, theoretical, conceptual. The words spun around me like fragmented Heinleinesque dreams.
The exhibit started with the theory behind quantum sciences, and introducing the main players. Schrodinger’s Cat stared me down from the darkened corners I dogged its impending doom finding myself in the quantum mechanics section. The room was laden with interactive games and displays. Before I knew it we already onto quantum information, the cutting edge of quantum science in our time. Dealing with encryption, superimposition and probability we were lost in the knowledge defining our time.
As artists, the information presented felt like performance piece, with the audience as the performers and the space as a stage, drawing us across in a series of dips, slides, leaps and bounds. We learned of waves, cryptography, mechanics and time. We were shown its past and left with an idea of its future. A future where quantum computers run all systems, a reality that has infinite computational ability. One step closer to the singularity.
As we stepped out the exhibit we knew that the KW journey was only half over as next stop we were headed to the prestigious, Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo.
