Ghosts of Unchosen Lives: Quantum Aesthetics and the Crisis of Identity

What happens to the life you did not choose? This article proposes quantum aesthetics as a media-theoretical framework for examining the material, perceptual and affective conditions through which indeterminacy is produced and experienced, extending the concept beyond thematic or iconographic engagements with physics. The argument begins with a genealogy of the unchosen, moving from Dostoevsky’s hyperconscious subject and Sartre’s freedom without guarantees to Derrida’s hauntology, and from there to the algorithmically curated social-media feed, where unlived possibilities acquire a persistent visual presence. What was once a philosophical problem has gained a technical infrastructure: the rejected possibility now returns daily as an image. Three case studies trace different configurations of this structure. In Where Dogs Run’s 1,4…19 (2014, Ural NCCA, Ekaterinburg), a living mouse moving through a luminous labyrinth generates virtual counterparts that follow the trajectories it did not take. When one of them is about to encounter the real animal, the system activates a physical barrier, progressively restricting its movement. The work complicates both Everettian branching and Karen Barad’s account of the agential cut: the unchosen neither withdraws into an inaccessible branch nor survives merely as a trace, but continues to act materially upon the present after a decision has been made. The article situates the installation within the wider Russian quantum-art scene of the 2010s, exemplified by LABORATORIA Art&Science’s Quantum Entanglement 2.0 at Arsenal, Nizhny Novgorod (2016), which brought together works by Dmitry Kawarga, Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::), Taisia Korotkova and Electroboutique. In Libby Heaney’s Heartbreak and Magic (Somerset House, 2024), this structure acquires a biographical dimension through grief. The many-worlds interpretation operates as an existential framework for imagining loss through the persistence of an inaccessible alternative reality, while quantum theory ceases to be metaphorical: Heaney works with IBM quantum computers and quantum algorithms that generate superposition and entanglement data used in the visual and sonic organisation of the installation, so that the precise configuration of each encounter cannot be fully predetermined. Indeterminacy becomes a condition of the medium rather than a concept represented by it, and the work provides a particularly compelling example of what Schröter terms second-order quantum media. In Emergence Delft’s Coexist (2025), superposition is reframed as an ethico-political proposition, a way of sustaining heterogeneous positions without prematurely collapsing them into a single perspective. Built from white light and polarising filters, the installation turns the reduction from multiplicity to singularity into an embodied passage in which the viewer’s trajectory conditions what becomes visible. Because these effects are produced through classical optics, the work belongs to first-order quantum media. The article also tests the limits of this analogy, asking whether conflicts structured by material inequality and asymmetries of power can adequately be understood through a model of multiple perspectives held in coexistence. Jens Schröter’s distinction between first- and second-order quantum media provides the framework for reading this spectrum. It rests on the observation that the twentieth century was already quantum in technical terms, since transistors, lasers, semiconductors and camera sensors all depend on quantum physics, even though they operated as classical media at the level of artistic experience. The distinction is diagnostic rather than hierarchical: it distinguishes practices in which quantum principles operate metaphorically or phenomenologically from those in which quantum effects become an explicit condition of artistic production. The article situates this sp