Quantum Error Choir
Quantum Error Choir inverts the relationship between audience and stage as participants’ smartphones form a giant lattice of ancilla qubits—rippling ambient music and color across the auditorium in their collective struggle to detect and resolve errors in the system.
While the artwork’s “quantum error” is metaphorical, the act of correcting it is not. The piece uses actual quantum error correction algorithms developed by Dr. Yue Wu at Yale University to resolve the accumulated error, and restore the choir to harmony. On real quantum hardware this process takes microseconds, but for this performance the act of resolution has been dramatically slowed so that it can be fully experienced at our human scale.