PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact – JE Solo
437-350-7768
blackbagmediacollective@gmail.com
Black Bag Media Collective Announces Quantum Computing Partnership
A historic first! Canadian media-artists will be connecting the minds of AI-enhanced virtual beings with a quantum computer.
VANCOUVER | TORONTO | CHICAGO | PRAGUE | VIENNA
March 17, 2021 – The Black Bag Media Collective is thrilled to announce that the Canada Council for the Arts has commenced funding for the research and creation project, Quantum Computing in NEOS VR. Led by Canadian artist JE Solo, this project will catalyze an international creative partnership between social VR and quantum computing companies.
To create their quantum virtual beings-as-living-artwork, BBMC artists will be working with these four companies:
* D-WAVE (Vancouver, Canada) – for direct usage of their 5,000 qubit quantum annealing enterprise supercomputer. https://www.dwavesys.com/
*US Advanced Computing Infrastructure, Inc. (aka Chicago Quantum, Chicago, USA) – for programming D-Wave’s supercomputer according to the artists’ specifications. https://www.chicagoquantum.com/
*NEOS VR (Prague, Czech Republic) for providing the immersive social VR world and assets. https://neos.com
*ViARsys (Vienna, Austria) for programming the virtual beings inside of NEOS VR using the LogiX VR visual-scripting language. https://www.viarsys.com
Cross-Sector Creative Impact On Technological Innovation
This ten-month project will showcase one of the first historical instances—within the artworld, industry, and corporate worlds—where a non-player character (NPC) inside of a social VR world (VR) has its mind connected to a quantum computer. One of these virtual beings will use D-Wave’s quantum computer to compose predictive song-lyrics, while the other virtual being will use this same computer to predict and recommend new virtual worlds to explore.
The quantum computing company D-Wave agrees that there has never been a use case where a quantum computer was linked to a virtual character in a “video game” environment.
The Black Bag Media Collective, operating since 2004, is a media and performance collective on the forefront of exploring digital technologies in arts practice. As BBMC co-founder, JE Solo, points out, “It’s always exciting to be working with emerging technologies, especially where so many different partners are involved. It is within these kinds of unique collaborations that real innovation happens.”
PARTNERS:
Quantum Computing in NEOS VR has been made possible thanks to the support of the Canada Council for the Arts | Conseil des arts du Canada
