Milutin Markovic

Reversed fossils 2023

Epistemological journey into photography, quantum mechanics, and its relation.

Photography was born when the image could stay on the surface permanently with the use of science-chemistry (alchemy?). To this day printed photography is not durable for longer than a few centuries alongside improvements in science, while the binary system of our computers acts as a one-dimensional human-dependent system for which we cannot guarantee complete longevity for such a period of time. In a world where humankind makes more than a billion images daily and AI models are stronger every day, I questioned the longevity and path of those images in the far future. Where and how will they end up? If photography is a tool to keep memories and preserve past doings, I turned to my family in search of an answer. Collaborating with my brother, a quantum physicist, and our father, a self-proclaimed philosopher we posed a theory to preserve the image through light, atom entanglement, and superposition. Read quantum physics. With our current technologies, our theory is still a theory, but it seems that technology is taking a big turn toward exponential acceleration which suggests that this work of art, with a background in quantum mechanics, might be materialized sooner than we could ever imagine.