Will we align?
Irja Linnerud
Royal Academy Of Art The Hague KABK
WILL WE ALIGN? is an interactive light installation by interactive media artist and designer Irja Linnerud, inspired by dynamics used in quantum communication. The work invites visitors to explore an unfamiliar system through light, movement and interaction. The installation features two central lights that represent entanglement: they rotate, overlap and change colour together. Surrounding them are seven stations with rotatable surfaces. By turning these surfaces, visitors influence the behaviour of the light. The interaction draws on quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that challenges our everyday understanding of connection and forms one of the principles behind emerging quantum communication technologies. Rather than explaining quantum physics, the installation translates some of its ideas into a physical system that can be explored intuitively. The colour changes in the installation are produced entirely mechanically, without digital colour processing. Polarised white light passes through a body of sugar water and then through a second polarising filter. As it travels through the sugar solution, its polarisation is rotated, causing different colours to emerge. By rotating the light sources and polarising elements, visitors directly interact with this process, making an otherwise invisible property of light visible through movement and colour. WILL WE ALIGN? grew from a desire to peek into the world of quantum technologies and develop a felt understanding of them. I approach the subject not as an expert, but through curiosity and experimentation, using the installation as a way to make sense of something I initially found difficult to grasp. Quantum technologies are often presented as highly specialised and inaccessible, while they are increasingly becoming part of the systems that shape our lives. The work asks how we might find points of entry into these technologies, and whether curiosity and direct experience can be enough to begin participating in conversations about them.