Wave Function Salon: Cibelle Cavalli Bastos

The title of the exhibition references the 19th century Feynmann or double-slit experiment, the concept of which is also informed by neuroscience; the functionality of our sensory organs, specifically sight and our reliance on our eyes to gauge “what is,”as well as the programming our brain undergoes as we grow up. The experiment shows that light travelling through two slits can display diffraction patterns illustrating the wave-like behaviour of electrons, which collapse to form a single particle when an observer is in place.The exhibition explores the philosophical idea that we too collapse a wave function within our own minds, when we encounter a body in space, as well as when we face our bodies in the mirror.

Cibelle Cavalli Bastos comments on the exhibition: “what one gazes upon is a combination of one’s projection and the ‘other’s’ own projection coming forwards, meeting somewhere in the middle. Each of us will collapse the wave when approaching someone or something, but that collapse will never generate the exact same “object” or “feeling” within us as what it may be to the observed, or someone else, because reality is relative and subjective. The nerve endings in our eyes are merely picking up vibrational waveforms as light hits the surface, and the brain is decoding them into shapes, lines, alongside our programming which then assigns a feeling or idea to what we see based on life experiences and knowledge acquired.”

We need to take our focus out of the surface, let it blur as we gaze upon it. Find a bridge to the right side of our brains that is perceptive, non rational, and navigate the inner layers of which we encounter whilst remembering the wave of possibilities that we all are, that the body one sees is just a membrane, a silver screen for our projections onto another and the life that permeates all is way deeper than that. ” comments Cibelle Cavalli Bastos.