Schrödinger’s Hybrid: The Collapse of the Aesthetic Wave Function
Before the artist’s gaze, the hybrid does not exist.
This is the radical claim of quantum mechanics applied to generative art: that the output of the algorithm, before selection, occupies a state of superposition. It is simultaneously signal and noise, masterpiece and failure, coherent form and entropic drift. The wave function has not yet collapsed. The work is alive and dead at the same time, in the precise sense that Schrödinger intended when he placed his cat in the box.
The artist opens the box.