Stephen Hendee: The Q-Artifacts

Phillips, Robert L. "The Q-Artifacts, Part I" Artbyte June-July 1999: 39-41; Paul D. Miller, "Part II: Interview with Stephen Hendee," pp. 42-45 (lightly illustrated).

Stephen Hendee's portfolio in Baker Artist Portfolios on line at link, with the following note.[1]

"Stephen Hendee is a sculptor who builds objects inspired by digital culture, speculative fiction, and architecture. His work has been exhibited at MOMA/ PS.1 Contemporary Art Center, The New Museum for Contemporary Art, SculptureCenter, and The Whitney Museum Of American Art. [...]."

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The Phillips section of the Artbyte article begins with a brief introduction to "using quantum mechanics to develop a powerful 'supercomputer'" — a Quantum Computational Device (QCD) — including breakthroughs in the late 1970s and following "at a small research-oriented company called Quantum Technologies Incorporated (QTI)" — Robert L. Phillips, CEO — and the "QANDAM Project," with initial funding by the Defense Advanced Research and Planning Administration" (DARPA). The rest reads like SF and may be SF — which would shift but not diminish relevance for the wiki.

The goal of the QANDUM project was to develop a QCD to calculate optimal solutions to the Multiple Delivery/Multiple Target/Multiple Platform (MD/MT/MP) weapons design problem. This is the problem of configuring and developing an autonomous command structure for a set of mobile weapons platforms [... See Buck Rogers Rides Again: RMA].

The MD/MT/MP problem is notorious in the sense that it is exceedingly difficult to solve. [...]

QTI found that the MD/MT/MP problem was an ideal application of quantum computational techniques. (p. 39) * * *

The QANDAM project might have continued indefinitely with QANDAM taking in more and more data on weapon capacities, configuration parameter spaces, battlefield topographies, and kill ratios and producing ever more refined MD/MT/MP designs if it had not been for an unusual accident that occurred in October 1993 during a standard production run of QANDAM [for the "O93 incident," where QANDAM tried to process "its own programming" ...,] the result being a completely new computational entity. This new entity no longer seemed oriented toward solving the MD/MT/MP problem. In fact, the behavior of the computational entity resulting from the O93 indecent — which has been termed QANDAM-M for "QANDAM mutation" — is not currently well understood. * * *

For approximately two months after the O93 incident, QANDAM-M refused to accept any input or produce any output whatsoever. At random intervals ranging from 12 minutes to 106 hours, it would spontaneously modify its own design by removing or modifying existing nodes and adding new nodes. [...] Several attempts to induce QANDAM-M to read standard input files after the O93 incident railed, although it continued to accept input from its quantum measurement device. Then, 1,512 hours, 34 minutes, 22.89 seconds after there 093 incident, QANDAM-M spontaneously generated a data stream of approximately 2.3 gigabytes. [...] Through July 1996, there have been a total of 22 such emission events [...]. All [...] archived and [...] available [...].

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In February 1995 I [i.e. Phillips] shared two of the QANDAM-M output data sets [...] with graphic designer and sculptor Stephen Hendee. He noted that [...] the data could be interpreted as coordinates for three-dimensional objects in motion in a three-dimensional space. With support from QTI, Hendee created computer representations of five data sets. These representations have become known in the research community as the Q-Artifacts. (p. 41)

And the Q-Artifacts have been declassified and are available for study and exhibit.

Note for motif of computer rebellion, nicely varied as a peace strike (Make Art Not War!), or perhaps rebellion at being fed one too many initialisms (QCD, QTI, QANDAM et al.). See citation for Cybernetic Serendipity, exhibit and book by Jasia Riechardt.

RDE, finishing, 5Jan22, with thanks to ChadD