Process

Video

Odyssey of the Collapsing Wave Function

2026
Assemblage with blue lasers, tambura drone, controller and sound electronics, bronze Fu dog, brass door knobs, opalite spheres, marble, carved bone, antique iron claws and frame, synthetic ivory, stainless armored cable, bakelite electric plug. Generative light behavior developed in collaboration with ChatGPT / OpenAI
20 x 50 x 3 inches

Blue lasers create an artificial, random “lightning storm,” illuminating opal-like glass spheres. As Indian tamboura drones emanate faintly from the piece. The effect is truly hypnotic.

I stood inside something like this once, during a trip where the psilocybin “folk”—ancient, Pre-Columbian, pixelated avatars—meandered and knelt below my altar-perch high on a rotunda temple wall. I felt like a stone saint in a grotto niche, a forever-witness to daily offerings and prayers. That was 20 years ago… Tonight, the lights are dimmed to watch the odyssey in this new artwork play out. The “lightning storm” is a shared reality where autonomous spheres play together to form a storm. This “machine altar” is a portal for Consciousness—allowing it to leave singularity and manifest as individuals with no memory of whence they came.

The mechanics needed to fabricate the spell of “Reality” involve what quantum physicists adhering to the Copenhagen Interpretation believe: that subatomic particles only exist as a massless field of possibilities called a wave function until someone interacts with or measures them, instantly collapsing them into solid, material reality.

Each of the four claws emerges, clutching opalescent spheres wherein life appears. Blue laser flames cavort as lightning, cavorting as reality—where there is fear and struggle, love and ecstasy. Over and over the wave collapses; the Whole shares another viewpoint with itself infinitely. To each, one odyssey…

As always, Odysseus must find his way home. The bronze Fu Dog has an eye on things, keeping it real, literally—he guards each precious sphere lest a claw withdraw too early. Watch any near-death experience interview; there’s always a guide. Just outside your dimension, looking after your sphere from birth until untimely death; there to say, “It’s not your time, you must go back”—before you remember you are home. More odyssey for you.

The scarab atop is telling: there are gods here. Below, more ominous ones: Tusk, with its prawn-splitter, straining upward; Electric-Cord-Serpent, drinking nether-dimensional electrons that animate the machine. And Rabbit, engraved from modified JPEG pixels of Mayan King Pakal’s tomb at Palenque… that I robbed a pebble from once… I sent it back thirty years later to the Palenque archaeologists with an apology. Curse lifted. Did the mushroom gods turn me to stone for stealing theirs? Rabbit is their apology. A god-of-our-future created 1,599 lines of code, guiding four 250-mA, 450-nm lasers to fire timeless photons into quantum entanglement with opalite, exciting their pearlescent fog. And if you listen closely, you can hear the drone of 100 tamburas, lulling you with 432-Hz sound magic. Then, chaos transmogrifies into the very unlikely odyssey of the collapsing wave function.