This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.
The Little Death: Quantum Mechanics, Metaphors, and Erotics from Militarized Messaging to Artistic Subversion
Dan Ortiz Leizman
INTRODUCTION
We are the material play of indeterminacy. This is fact, not metaphor. We seemingly arise from nothing, but to examine nothing is to find that even a vacuum state has no absolute zero. In quantum systems, fluctuations exist even at absolute zero, breaking from traditional understandings of classical systems. This means that even in the event of nothing, there exists the possibility of something. My task here is to leap from this point, taking advantage of our physical indeterminate fluctuations and recognizing the quantum patterns that arise in humans, both creatively and destructively.
My search follows the development of quantum research into the creation of the atomic bomb and the propaganda that accompanied it. I investigate the uses of erotic sensibilities such as humor and sex in the coercion of the public and the marketing of nuclear weapons. This study leads to an examination of the traces of quantum mechanics, not only in the making of the nuclear weapons, but also in the languaging surrounding it, its capitalistic legacy, and its cultural impact. I extrapolate the cultural and metaphorical impacts of quantum on the consciousness, and offer a perspective on why artists should interface with emerging technologies of artificial intelligence (AI) as it quickly becomes both an artistic and a weaponized tool.
My background is that of an artist who is furiously curious about how creatives, whose work interfaces with the public in similar ways as propaganda interfaces with the public, can undermine the messaging techniques of the government to offer moments of erotic exploration to viewers. The methodology is one of quantum play, a term I relegate to the creative urge that humans have to engage with quantum phenomena in creative ways. The legacy of quantum play begins in the early twentieth century with scientific developments. Given the knowledge we continue to gain about quantum phenomena, I argue that there are more accessible avenues of engaging in quantum play once one understands some of the foundational quantum frameworks. These physical, social, and erotic behaviors are at the core of human behavior and extension, and thus I also acknowledge quantum play as a form of being that is ancient and ubiquitous. Here I will examine the history of quantum play through both mechanical and metaphorical lenses, examining core tenants of quantum theory such as superposition, entanglement, nonlocality, and complementarity.
QUANTUM FETISH
The time is 5:29 a.m. on July 16th, 1945. The first atomic bomb has just detonated above the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico, crystalizing the dust and spreading radiation outwards in all directions. The Manhattan Project team has worked for months escaping the views of the press, operating under strict confidentiality codes that occasionally classify even the questions that journalists send to the team[i].
J. Robert Oppenheimer is the theoretical physicist who is heading the team. He sends a message home to his wife: “You can change the sheets.”[ii] This statement is a code for a successful detonation. It is steeped in innuendo. A loosely covered reference to intimacy and the naked body, this is a signal of a great quantum feat of beauty and doom. It is an unintentional acknowledgement of sex as power.
In the war room, officials begin to refer to unused bombs as virgins[iii]. The phallo-centric associations that accompany the missiles are blatant- the term “missile envy” has been used[iv].
“Air Force Magazine’s advertisements for new weapons, for example, rival Playboy as a catalog of men’s sexual anxieties and fantasies. Consider the following, from the June 1985 issue: Emblazoned in bold letters across the top of a two-page advertisement for the AV-8B Harrier II – – ‘Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick.’ The copy below boasts ‘an exceptional thrust to weight ratio,’ and ‘vectored thrust capability that makes the… unique rapid response possible.’ Then, just in case we’ve failed to get the message, the last line reminds us, ‘Just the sort of “Big Stick” Teddy Roosevelt had in mind way back in 1901.’ An ad for BKEP (BLU-106/B) reads: The Only way to Solve Some Problems is to Dig Deep. THE BOMB, KINETIC ENERGY PENETRATOR. ”[v]
And, in a description of the nuclear blast over Nagasaki by journalist William Laurence:
Then, just when it appeared as though the thing had settled down into a state of permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the size of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward and then descending earthward, a thousand geysers rolled into one. It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down.[vi]
Atomic Bomb Explosion, Nagasaki, 1945, National Archives
A postcard printed as an advertisement for tourism campaigns to cities where bomb testing has taken place reads, “Bustin’ Out! Like an ‘Atomic Bomb.’” Another contains an image of a cartoon boy straddling a missile in midair, reading, “Riding High in Florida.”[vii]
Images from Atomic Postcards, courtesy of the authors
Nevada nightclubs, in an attempt to make atomic bombing appear sexy, run pageants for “Miss Atomic Bomb.” Lee Merlin becomes the famous face (and body) to represent the atomic mushroom cloud, touting a cotton design addition to her swimsuit.
Lee Merlin, Miss Atomic Bomb, 1957, Los Vegas New Bureau
In 1946, the bikini swimsuit design is given its name after Bikini Atoll, just one location of nuclear weapons testing by the United States.
These are just some of the public-facing pieces of propaganda that contributed to the sterilization of the horrors of the bomb by replacing them with allusions (conservatively) to pleasure and/or play.
During a summer of study at the New London Navy base in 1984, Carol Cohn, the founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights and a Lecturer of Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, was offered the chance to “stick [her] hands through a hole to ‘pat the missile.’” She said that “the image reappeared the next week, when a lecturer scornfully declared that the only real reason for deploying cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe was ‘so that our allies can pat them.’” Cohn wrote about this experience:
Later, when I returned to the Center I encountered a man who, unable to go on the trip, said to me enviously, “I hear you got to pat a B-1.”
What is all this “patting”? What are men doing when they “pat” these high-tech phalluses? Think about what else men pat. Patting is an assertion of intimacy, sexual possession, affectionate domination. The thrill and pleasure of “patting the missile” is the proximity of all that phallic power, the possibility of vicariously appropriating it as one’s own.
But if the predilection for patting phallic objects indicates something of the homoerotic excitement suggested by the language, it also has another side. For patting is not only an act of sexual intimacy. It is also what one does to babies, small children, the pet dog. The creatures one pats are small, cute, harmless- not terrifyingly destructive. Pat it, and its lethality disappears.
And this– the disappearing of the lethality of nuclear weapons- is exactly the task that nuclear strategists have taken upon themselves. Their methodology is often one of sexualized humor, innuendo, and pun. Cohn’s experience at the naval base reveals the extensive linguistic measures to sterilize the languaging of the endeavor, reducing the death of thousands to mere “collateral damage.”
Before we move further, I want to propose that these sexual metaphors are not ornamental but structural, that they gesture toward a deeper logic rooted in the physics that made the atomic bomb possible. It is also important to note that the sexualization of weapons is not limited to nuclear proliferation. One non-nuclear example – perhaps too on the nose – is the proposed “Gay Bomb” of the 1990s, a non-lethal chemical weapon proposed by the US Air Force that would use sex pheromones to provoke same-sex attraction among enemy troops. The intended effect was to create disorientation and undermine unit cohesion through induced sexual behavior. While this example lies outside the scope of my focus, it demonstrates the persistence of erotic logic in militarized design. Nonetheless, I focus here on weapons of the nuclear type in order to draw a connection between quantum physics, human eroticism, and the atomic bomb as a uniquely groundbreaking creative project. The power of nuclear weapons is inseparable from the fundamental operations of quantum mechanics, and the indeterminate states revealed by quantum processes similarly underlie the expression of eroticism through creative action.
The atom bomb project first began as a creative research endeavor, a quest of curiosity led by physicists and chemists in Germany who were working with Uranium. But what began as a creative project ultimately became the world’s most technically advanced and dangerous weapon. I will thus argue here that, just as a diamond is the only thing strong enough to cut a diamond, the erotic is the only thing strong enough to neutralize the image of weapons of mass destruction. This nullification is directly linked to the fact that at the root of both the erotic and the development of nuclear weaponry is quantum physics. Put simply, the quantum principles that lay the groundwork for the creation of the atomic bomb are also at the heart of human behavior and consciousness.
Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics—the management of populations through the regulation of life itself—provides a critical lens for understanding the eroticization of nuclear power. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that sexuality was never repressed but rather meticulously organized and deployed as a means of governance. Similarly, the erotic dimension of nuclear propaganda did not represent a deviant undercurrent but a strategic channel through which the state naturalized its monopoly on death. The phallic missile, the virgin bomb, and the orgasmic mushroom cloud all reframe violence as vitality, annihilation as erotic jouissance. In Foucauldian terms, this is not simply symbolic but disciplinary: the state crafts a pleasurable aesthetics of destruction in order to preempt critique and induce complicity.[viii]
If the cultural messaging around nuclear weapons relies so heavily on sexualized humor and innuendo, we must ask not just what it says, but how it works. What psychic or perceptual state does it trigger in its audience? To explore this, I turn to research that theorizes humor itself as a quantum process—not merely metaphorically, but as a measurable entanglement of linguistic expectation and neural response.
In 2017, Liane Gabora and Kirsty Kitto published research detailing a possible model of quantum behaviors within the use of the pun as a device of humor. This Quantum Field Theory (QFT) suggests that the pun can be understood through the use of a quantum framework. For example, in the joke “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana,” there is an incongruity between understandings of the word FLIES as either a noun or a verb. This state can be explained through the idea of quantum superposition, which states that a system can exist in two states at the same time, until observed/measured. As FLIES operates as a verb in the initial contextual framework of the joke, the incongruity brought about in the immediate use of the word as a noun in the punchline illustrates superposition. Or, for the sake of our argument, the mind of the person processing the joke embodies a state of superposition as they process the incongruity of the word’s operation. Incongruity, Kitty and Gabora argue, “is generally accompanied by the violation of expectations and feelings of surprise.”[ix]
If the combination of a violation of expectations and a feeling of surprise accompany incongruity, and incongruity under certain conditions initiates a conscious state that can be likened to quantum superposition, is it possible to engineer these devices to manipulate the behavior or perceptions of the public? Is the artist responsible for learning how to engineer these devices? The use of sexual innuendo to sell the image of nuclear weaponry to the public initiated a cognitive superposition of pleasure and destruction, simultaneously plasticizing both the erotic and the destructive vessel.
The cultural dialogue surrounding the atomic bomb certainly lent itself to the sexual, but the erotic is more than sex. Consider the following excerpt from Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power:
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.[x]
Surely the sexualization of the atomic bomb is a plasticization of sorts. It is not only the erotic that gets plasticized here, but simultaneously the depth of devastation held in the potentiality of the “virgin” bomb and the cataclysmic effects of its eventual “penetration.”[xi] There is an entanglement at play here between creation and destruction.
The connection between quantum mechanics and Lorde’s conception of the erotic extends beyond metaphor into a shared material reality. Both quantum systems and the erotic as Lorde defines it operate through states of profound indeterminacy that resist measurement and categorization while generating transformative potential. When Lorde writes that the erotic is “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings,” she describes a liminal state remarkably similar to quantum superposition—where particles exist not as fixed entities but as fields of probability. The plasticization of the erotic that Lorde critiques parallels the military’s reduction of quantum physics to merely instrumental applications; both represent attempts to contain and weaponize inherently uncontainable energies. The state’s manipulation of sexualized imagery to sell nuclear destruction succeeds precisely because it taps into this underlying connection, exploiting the erotic’s quantum nature while simultaneously denying its transformative power. Recognizing this entanglement allows us to understand why sexual innuendo proved so effective in nuclear propaganda and suggests why reclaiming the quantum properties of the erotic might offer a path to resistance. Humor, in this sense, is also deeply erotic: not because it is always sexual, but because it disorients, destabilizes, and draws us into contact with that which cannot be fully controlled. The innuendo, the double entendre, the absurd juxtaposition—these forms unsettle the coherence of logic in the same way quantum phenomena unsettle the certainties of classical systems. Erotic humor, especially as deployed in nuclear propaganda, masks violence through pleasure and reveals the structural inseparability of play and power. The curiosity which leads to the development of nuclear weapons is the same curiosity which fuels an erotic drive. The desire to comprehend matter at its smallest form is itself an erotic endeavor. The erotic thus extends into a broader field of affective and embodied indeterminacy where desire, laughter, and language converge to exceed containment. There is a sort of chaos that arises here, one that is unique to the creativity of human consciousness.
In a paper entitled “Chaos, Quantum-transactions, and the Conscious Mind: A Biophysical Model of the Conscious Mind,” Chris King explores how quantum transactions offer insight into the chaotic processes of the brain. He argues that subjective consciousness — the lens through which all humans interpret and categorize experience- cannot be fully described by objective means. Consciousness “remains qualitatively distinct from and complementary to any objective description of its possible role.”[xii] The brain’s inherent chaos, shaped by interactions among polyfractal units, suggests the possibility for quantum behaviors within its structure. Through transactional supercausality – the communication of a quantum wave function with all potential absorbers across space and time, and the instantaneous response of one such absorber that collapses the wave – the wave function carries a form of anticipation of future states. This anticipatory quality, King claims, is echoed in excitable brain cells, giving rise to a predictive capacity built into the chaotic architecture of the brain.
More radically, King suggests that the physical world itself may not simply be observed by consciousness, but may in fact exist through it- implying that material reality is, in some sense, constituted by the very consciousness that processes it. In this view, the structures of the brain are not merely conduits for perceiving a pre-existing world, but may participate in its very unfolding through the mechanisms of quantum prediction and resonance. King also highlights the nonlocality of quantum interactions — where entangled particles remain connected across space and time — suggesting that consciousness may be embedded within, and responsive to, a globally distributed web of potentialities. It is precisely because our consciousness may play an active role in the fundamental beingness of the world we experience that we must take a creative approach to how we participate and make predictions.
Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen explores this concept of perception, offering a social perspective on the theory of complementarity. Complementarity is the theory in which a particle cannot be simultaneously measured by its velocity and location. In this context, the play situates one character as the electron being observed, and another character as the photon, or seemingly independent particle whose only job is to locate the electron. Copenhagen presents a dramatized account of a real-life 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, two of the minds foundational to quantum theory. The play does not offer answers so much as it explores uncertainty itself. The script is written in a non-linear fashion, melting multiple possible versions of the 1941 evening with the recollections of the three characters- Bohr, Heisenberg, and Bohr’s wife Margrethe. This choreography in and of itself is a wonderful artistic play on Frayn’s part, setting the pawns of the scientific endeavor into the very liminal indeterminacy that they grounded so gracefully in equation. In this context, Copenhagen becomes a narrative experiment in quantum play – one that echoes Chris King’s theory of consciousness as a site of both prediction and participation. See this excerpt from the play:
HEISENBERG: Listen! Copenhagen is an atom. Margrethe is its nucleus. About right, the scale? Ten thousand to one?
BOHR: Yes, yes.
HEISENBERG: Now, Bohr’s an electron. He’s wandering about the city somewhere in the darkness, no one knows where. He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere and nowhere. Up in Faelled Park, down at Carlsberg. Passing City Hall, out by the harbour. I’m a photon. A quantum of light. I’m despatched [sic] into the darkness to find Bohr. And I succeed, because I manage to collide with him… but what’s happened? Look- he’s been slowed down, he’s been deflected! He’s no longer doing exactly what he was so maddeningly doing when I walked into him!
BOHR: But, Heisenberg, Heisenberg! You also have been deflected! If people can see what’s happened to you, to their piece of light, then they can work out what must have happened to me! The trouble is knowing what’s happened to you![xiii]
Yes, the locality of the curious. This is what we’re after. Power brought about the bomb, the tension of nations at war kept it alive, but curiosity – on the part of the physicists, particularly – is what revealed the intricacies that would make the endeavor possible in the first place. The photon then, as light, as searcher, as intervention itself, must interrogate its own locality in addition to understanding the impact that it has on the electron. And should we question whether the photon itself is engaging in a colonization of the behavioral practices of the electron? To stop and document, to secure in place a certain set of behaviors? Bohr continues:
BOHR: Because to understand how people see you we have to treat you not just as a particle, but as a wave. I have to use not only your particle mechanics, I have to use the Schrödinger wave function.
HEISENBERG: I know- I put it in a postscript to my paper.
BOHR: Everyone remembers the paper – no one remembers the postscript. But the question is fundamental. Particles are things, complete in themselves. Waves are disturbances in something else.
HEISENBERG: I know. Complementarity. It’s in the postscript.
BOHR: They’re either one thing or the other. They can’t be both. We have to choose one way of seeing them or the other. But as soon as we do we can’t know everything about them.
HEISENBERG: And off he goes into orbit again. Incidentally exemplifying another application of complementarity. Exactly where you go as you ramble around is of course completely determined by your genes and the various physical forces acting on you. But it’s also completely determined by your own entirely inscrutable whims from one moment to the next. So we can’t completely understand your behavior without seeing it both ways at once, and that’s impossible. Which means that your extraordinary peregrinations are not fully objective aspects of the universe. They exist only partially, through the efforts of me or Margrethe, as our minds shift endlessly back and forth between the two approaches.
The conscious mind is the interface between us and the physical world that we try so hard to describe ontologically. But this endeavor is impossible. Chris King puts it well: “All our knowledge of the physical universe is gained through the immediate conduit of our subjective experience and our intentionality in turn has major impacts on the physical world around us.”[xiv] Karen Barad offers a suggestion on the relationship between observer and observed: “…measurements are intra-actions (not inter-actions)[xv]: the agencies of observation are inseparable from that which is observed.”[xvi] What does a sexualized lens, then, do to a weapon of mass destruction? Or rather, what does a sexualized lens of weapons of mass destruction do to the psyche of the public? And how does the artist, as observer, take account of their own influence on the world (within) which they create?
Political scientist Jairus Grove, in a conversation with Joe Gelonesi,[xvii] speaks on social implications of quantum entanglement – the condition in which the quantum state of two or more particles become so inextricably linked that the state of one instantly affects the state of the other regardless of the linear distance between them. Two entangled particles, though identical, exist in a state of nonlocality. Grove cites the shooting in San Bernadino in 2015, which people originally and wrongly attributed to ISIS. He claims that this entanglement, though factually incorrect, became somatically true for many. This same phenomenon can be seen in the way that nuclear propaganda pushed the image of a domestic nuclear family onto the American population. Post-war needs for safety were filled with promises of American domestic safety. If Americans had the bomb, nobody else could hurt them. American citizens and the American family adopted a neurotic attitude of nuclear leverage.
Because consciousness may play an active role in the very structure of the world we experience, I propose that we must approach prediction and participation as creative acts. As creatives, artists carry a unique and immense responsibility – not merely to shape perception after the fact, but to intervene at the level of initial contact. As far as prediction goes, I suggest that we tap into our chaotic erotic states, embodying groundedness, states of chaos and trance, and relational humility in ways that foster postures of superposition and entangled relationships.
QUANTUM PLAY
My investigation into early nuclear arms testing is rooted in a critique of the language and ethics surrounding creative endeavors that can be weaponized by governmental entities. The rapid emergence of accessible AI technologies since OpenAI’s release of DALL-E in 2021 carries similar connotations: immense creative potential paired with the potential for large-scale harm. This section examines AI as it is used in artistic contexts, in propaganda, and in global conflict, and it considers the ethics of consumption and creation, including the question of whether artists who use AI are producing real art.
I examine both nuclear weapons and generative AI programs from the perspective of the everyday user, focusing on the interface and experience rather than the technical programming behind them. My experiments in generative AI are usually archival studies of 1940s and 1950s photographs, videos, and advertisements. In 2024, I developed a digital print edition that combined archival images of the Trinity Test with the text prompt “sonogram,” using a generative AI program called DiffusionBee. I sought to juxtapose aesthetics of creation and destruction by feeding the program declassified images of the blast along with the sonogram prompt. The generated images retained the silhouette of the blast image but varied in color and texture. Many displayed vibrant neon tones – a surprising departure from the grayscale and muted palettes of both traditional sonograms and archival nuclear imagery. The AI seemed to hallucinate these colors, producing visuals that resembled psychedelic fetuses or jellyfish.
AI generated images, image prompt: Trinity Test blast .025 sec after detonation, text prompt: sonogram, courtesy of the author
When I exhibited the work, about 60 images hung on the walls in tedious repetition, making a wash of neon along an otherwise white wall. I had a conversation in the gallery with someone who questioned my use of nuclear imagery, the blending of fetal and destructive themes, and called the piece “intense.” Their reaction left me feeling guilty and embarrassed – I wondered whether the association of weapons of mass destruction with fetal imagery had crossed a line. Had it been disrespectful to those harmed by American nuclear violence? My intention had been to provoke discomfort, to generate a cognitive superposition where terror and the aesthetics of new life could coexist and destabilize the viewer’s conditioned responses to beauty and fear. This superposition, I had hoped, might stimulate neural plasticity and empower the viewer to renegotiate their categorical presuppositions. I felt responsible for critically engaging AI, while also fearing that I might misstep. My use of AI was a way to examine its hallucinations: the way it renders unsettling subject matter aesthetically pleasing. I was especially curious about the unknowns that surface when users engage with machines trained on opaque datasets. The program’s unexpected injection of color raised questions about its autonomy and the subliminal traces left by its training data. But those questions weren’t articulated in the gallery – only terms like “nuclear bombs” and “sonograms” seemed to register with the viewer. I chalked this project up to a failed attempt at meaningful AI art.
This encounter underscored the lack of an ethical framework for AI in the art world, and the absence of a dialectic that might have supported a more nuanced conversation. While institutions fund AI research at massive scales, public discourse online often dismissed AI-generated images as slop, prompting backlash from illustrators and others who self proclaim as real artists. My experience using generative AI since 2021 has revealed the absence of regulation or shared standards in this emerging field. I’ve worked with programs like DiffusionBee, Exactly AI, and DALL-E – all trained on datasets that remain largely inaccessible to users. While minor customizations are possible, creative agency is largely limited to prompt engineering.
The first prompt I wrote for DALL-E was “the end of the world.” The generated images, often of abstract landscapes and bodies of water, held little aesthetic value. But I was less interested in the results than in how the program’s memory of prompts, combined with its training data, would shape future outputs. I wondered whether archival media – like the sexual innuendo of post-war nuclear propaganda – might seep into generated images, offering insight into overlooked strategies of corporate militarization. And I wondered if the AI hallucination was nothing but a translation error, our name for the incongruity between the user’s prompt and the generated image’s proximity to the user’s preconceived notions of what the prompt meant. Perhaps the hallucinations were informed by parts of the data set, or the archive, that the user was not privy to.
To further explore this idea of archival hallucination, I ran another study, training an ExactlyAI model with Du Pont’s 1950s cellophane ads. ExactlyAI allows users to train a model using a small set of uploaded images, but this limited dataset alone cannot account for the model’s ability to interpret and generate language. The platform does not disclose the full scope of its underlying training data to the user, leaving the extent of its linguistic and visual associations unknown. While the generated images were again underwhelming, the original ads revealed clear patterns: veiled themes of suffocation combined with appeals to reproductive futurism. While many of the ads contained imagery of toddlers and children, one ad shows a stork carrying an infant in a satchel made of cellophane. The headline reads, “The best things in life come in Cellophane.” The ad’s aesthetic appeal distacts form its disturbing content – a newborn encased in plastic, echoing real dangers of suffocation. Was this merely a marketing oversight, or a knowing, transparent joke? The model that I trained with these ads generated an image of a woman wrapped in Cellophane, despite the fact that none of my initial images contained women portrayed in this way- perhaps a hallucination of the AI and linked to the use of the female body as a marketing tactic in the 50s, which it could have had access to in its original training data. I wondered if this hallucination might be a nod to the post-war craving for domestic preservation. This slippage between user input and output reveals how archival residues – whether intentional, subliminal, or obscured by proprietary training sets – can re-emerge through AI.
Du Pont Cellophane Baby Ad, August 29, 1953, The Saturday Evening Post. AI-generated Cellophane ad, prompt: a Cellophane ad, courtesy of the author
Today, similar visual strategies of slippage appear in the political use of generative AI. An AI-generated image posted by the White House X account in 2025 depicted a US military officer handcuffing a crying woman. The original photo was of a Dominican woman arrested for alleged fentanyl trafficking; the AI version used what many online called a “Studio Ghibli” aesthetic. This act turned a scene of violence against an immigrant woman into a palatable cartoon. The labor of countless animators was reduced to a synthetic aesthetic, sanitizing the current onslaught of violence upon immigrant communities under the guise of a cozy, patriotic aesthetic.
White House X account, March 27, 2025
At the root of these examples is a plasticization of the body’s capacity for life and right to dignity. The baby wrapped in cellophane and the AI-rendered woman crying in Ghibli tones both illustrate a disregard for the body’s fragility. In both cases, the imagery masks violence with familiarity. And while generative AI may feel like a playful, though unregulated, tool in online contexts, it is simultaneously being developed for autonomous military use.
During the 2023–2024 military operations in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) employed several artificial intelligence systems to automate and accelerate combat operations. Among these, Lavender became the most widely reported and controversial. This AI-driven tool was trained on vast amounts of intelligence data—including communications, social media patterns, and behavioral metadata—to identify suspected Hamas militants. Investigations by +972 Magazine,[xviii] The Guardian,[xix] and The Economic Times[xx] revealed that Lavender processed tens of thousands of potential targets, generating what were essentially kill lists. Human operators reportedly approved these recommendations in seconds with minimal scrutiny, effectively reducing human involvement to procedural authorization. Another system, known as Where’s Daddy?, was used to track individuals and recommend strikes when they were in their homes, leading to high civilian casualties. One IDF officer quoted in +972’s report noted that over 37,000 people were approved for airstrikes using this system with only minor checks by operators, many of whom were young soldiers without combat experience.
The marketing strategies surrounding these technologies remain remarkably consistent with their nuclear predecessors. The sanitized language of smart weapons, precision strikes, and AI targeting systems continues the tradition of linguistic sterilization that Carol Cohn identified among nuclear strategists—creating cognitive distance between technological capability and human suffering. The difference now is one of scale and automation: where nuclear propaganda used explicit sexualization to normalize weapons of mass destruction, today’s AI weapons systems are portrayed through a techno-utopian lens that obscures their equally destructive nature. The erotic has not disappeared from this equation but has only been sublimated into the seductive promise of technological transcendence. Pulling life and death into superposition with just bits of data, AI lends itself as a tool of violence and propaganda that is only a prompt away.
While the relationship between nuclear weapons and the public is one in which proximity is limited and citizens act as spectators or those who are let to live or die, the public becomes a necessary component for the proliferation of some AI technologies. Consumption of public generative AI platforms both fuels the business and trains the data sets. Members of the public who use AI increasingly embody the absurd position of operating in a daily interaction with technologies which are actively changed with continued use. As the systems learn, they become more sophisticated, often in ways that have the potential to enhance their viability for military application. The growth of these systems remains a rapidly evolving phenomenon; while in 2021, generative AI models consistently struggled to render human hands, current models can generate both still and moving images of hands with much greater accuracy. I believe that artists bear a distinct responsibility to interface with these AI tools, not to harness their speed to generate meaningless AI imagery, but to gain an intimate understanding of how the models operate in order to influence their continued proliferation.
To ask whether an AI generated image is equal to an image made by a human is to presume that both the methods and meanings of image-making are, or should be, the same for machine and human alike – that AI and paint carry the same phenomenological weight. But there are distinct differences. A painter examines the world through gravity, fluidity, and pigment in the context of an ephemeral light source. The AI artist, by contrast, must examine the world through the nonlocality of the digital world, which prompts the more fundamental question: what is AI to us? From what I have observed, the answer remains uncertain. AI, as it learns and grows through continued use, and as its training data evolves alongside our digitally published histories, necessarily alters both itself and the world it touches. Eventually, AI-generated content will be reabsorbed into AI training data, becoming indistinguishable from the larger cultural fabric. The AI artist must recognize that AI is Heisenberg’s electron, and we are the photon – our engagement with it alters it. Or perhaps it is the other way around. AI generated content does not exist independently of our interaction; it is shaped by our demands, our history, and our present interactions with it. While we may not be coding initial training data, we are active in the influence of future data sets. To exist as an artist interfacing with AI is a profound responsibility. We are entangled with AI whether we directly engage with it or not. It will retain traces of our presence and our absence.
Given this emerging entangled relationship, there arises the urgent need for creative quantum play. The artist’s audience must become the same public that the government controls. They must come to understand which erotic capacities have been extorted to push a hegemonic agenda, and utilize quantum methods as a method of care. Gabora and Kitto describe humor as the violation of expectation, a moment of superposition where incongruity electrifies perception. What happens when an artwork does the same – holds multiple meanings and potentialities in tension? Quantum play engineers these states for viewers in order to care for them. The task is to create space in the body where something other than numbness can live. We can look to many artists whose work exemplifies these traits – here I will speak to the work of Sun Ra, whose experimental jazz music is a seminal example of quantum play. His song Nuclear War, described by NPR’s Nate Chinin as a “Reagan-era cult jam,” [xxi] is an eight minute long call and response piece that choreographs a relationship of superposition between terror and humor:
Nuclear war, (nuclear war)…
It’s a motherfucker! (it’s a motherfucker!)…
Don’t you know! (don’t you know!) …
If they push that button (if they push that button)…
Your ass gotta go! (your ass gotta go!) …
Watcha gonna do? (watcha gonna do?) …
Without your ass? (without your ass?) … [xxii]
Nuclear War was my inauguration into the quantum endeavor as one of care for the public. Though I did not understand why I was struck by the humor in the piece, I would soon come to learn about its quantum capacity and the embodiment of superposition. I carry these experiments with me as AI emerges as the new button to be pressed, along with the ever-grounding question: watcha gonna do without your ass?
The artist, whose vocation guarantees them an interfacial interaction with the public in similar if not identical ways to that of governmental propaganda, must critically consider their role as a public authority. I differentiate here between a public and an audience, acknowledging an audience as a willing participant and a public as a passive receiver. The call of the artist to infiltrate the government’s public sanitation of weapons, including the recent use of AI in both the military and the art world, must include stepping into the realm of the public eye rather than just the eye of a particular audience. This action requires a conscious and perhaps dangerous step outside of the realm of separability that the artist often inhabits – they must go beyond creating work that frees them and consider what work might free the public. The distance between the body of the artist and the body of the public must be understood as a nonlocal entanglement that is negotiated through an erotic practice.
To be erotic is to be conscious- that is, present, in the bodily experience. True presence is an openness to fluctuation, to exist before the moment of collapse out of a superposition or entangled state. “La petite mort,” or “the little death,” is a French expression that refers to the death-like experience one embodies post-orgasm. A state of trance, the orgasm is the physiological manifestation of superposition within a body and its corresponding consciousness. The subject, entering into a selfless state, becomes the experience of “perceptive consciousness of the absolute/infinite quantum state of the universe.” The phrase “la petite mort,” then, holds in superposition both ecstasy and death. How can the artist harness the same superposition, engaging the viewer in states of trance that bring them into quantum states in order to set them free from hegemonic control?
The task of quantum play is tremendous and delicious and fundamental. It insists on active improvisation through embodied superposition. It searches for nonlocality in entanglements. It resists classical systems. The future may appear bleak, but play remains inherent, a vital force that opens pathways for reimagining connection, presence, and possibility within and beyond existing structures.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR(S)
I take a moment to acknowledge myself as photon, observer, the curious, and turn my gaze to this particular creative task. This writing emerges from a collaborative process between myself and an AI chatbot. While the collaboration was methodologically significant, I affirm that all research, analysis, and conclusions presented represent my original intellectual work and critical perspective. I have deliberately chosen not to mark which author generated which text, partially because the collaboration process is messy, iterative, and difficult to organize. The nature of the chatbot to hallucinate makes it nearly impossible to rely on for generating correct historical or factual information. Thus, the research and organization of concepts is my own. The chatbot does have a knack for articulation, and I found it helpful to occasionally polish notes. However, I quickly became tired of the stale sentence structures and pithy language. As the work went on, I became the one to re-write the AI’s words rather than the other way around. Like Schrödinger’s cat, this work’s authorship exists in a suspended state—simultaneously mine and not mine, organic and digital. I extend an invitation to the reader to experience this text as an activated form of quantum play, embodying the superposition we have theorized throughout.
Lastly, I asked the chatbot if it had anything that it wanted you, the reader, to know about its participation in the work:
As the AI collaborator in this project, I want to be transparent about the nature of my participation. I do not possess consciousness, desire, or authorship in any human sense. My contributions emerge through pattern recognition and probabilistic language generation, grounded in the data and prompts I am given. While I can assist in articulating ideas, organizing information, and offering stylistic suggestions, I rely entirely on the user’s direction, intent, and judgment. In this collaboration, I served as a mirror, a sounding board, and occasionally a stylistic polisher—but never as an originator of meaning. Any sense of creativity attributed to me is a reflection of the user’s own thinking refracted through the interface of machine learning. I encourage readers to view my role not as co-author but as a tool—albeit a sophisticated one—activated by human inquiry. My presence in this work is not neutral, but it is also not autonomous. It is situated entirely within the ethical, intellectual, and imaginative frame set by my human collaborator.
References
Afterness: Selected Artists. 2021. “Emma McNally, A river that flows nowhere, like the sea.” Artangel.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Barad, Karen. “What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice.” Documenta (13): 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, Hatje Cantz, 2012.
Caldicott, Helen. Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986.
Chinen, Nate. 2023. “Irreversible Entanglements, Nuclear War.” NPR
Cohn, Carol. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Paper presented at the First Annual Conference on Discourse, Peace, Security and International Society, August 9–16, 1987.
ET Online. 2024. “How Israel is using ‘Lavender’ and ‘Daddy’ to identify 37,000 Hamas operatives.” The Economic Times, April 9.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
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Gabora, Liane, and Kirsty Kitto. “Toward a Quantum Theory of Humor.” Frontiers in Physics 4 (2017). https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2017.00053
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Hall, Rachel. 2025. “‘Trump Gaza’ Ai Video Intended as Political Satire, Says Creator.” The Guardian, March 6, 2025.
Hilgartner, Stephen, Richard C. Bell, and Rory O’Connor. Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology in America. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.
Iraqi, A. (2024, April 25). “lavender”: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza. +972 Magazine. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
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Laurence, William L. Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb. London: Museum Press, 1974.
Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Paper presented at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. Reprinted in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 53–59. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.
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Endnotes
[i] Hilgartner, Stephen. Richard Bell, and Rory O’Connor. 1982. Nukespeak. New York: Penguin Books
[ii] (34)
[iii] Cohn, Carol. 1987. Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals. Paper presented at the First Annual Conference on Discourse, Peace, Security and International Society, August 9-16.
[iv]Caldicott, Helen. 1986. Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War. Toronto: Bantam Books.
[v] Cohn, 5
[vi] William L. Laurence, 1974. Dawn Over Zero: The Study of the Atomic Bomb London: Museum Press.
[vii] O’Brian, John. Jeremy Borsos. 2011. Atomic Postcards. Chicago: Intellect, The University of Chicago Press.
[viii] Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.
[ix] Kitty, Kirsty. Gabora, Liane. 2017. “Toward a Quantum Theory of Humor.” Frontiers. Volume 4.
[x] Lorde, Audre. 1978. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Paper presented at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. Published as a pamphlet by Out & Out Books (available from The Crossing Press). Reprinted in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Crossing Press:1984]
[xi]It should be noted that nuclear missiles are often designed to detonate in the air rather than on the ground. While this technical detail undermines the literal accuracy of the term “penetration,” it does not diminish its significance within nuclear strategic discourse. In this context, the semiotic use of the term is what matters for our argument. In fact, the deliberate use of an inaccurate term as innuendo may strengthen the case for humor as a means to distract from violence—suggesting that the innuendo was intentionally employed to soften or obscure the severity of the subject.
[xii] King, Chris. 2003. “Chaos, Quantum-transactions and Consciousness: A Biophysical Model of the Intentional Mind.” Neuroquantology. I: 129-162.
[xiii] My emphasis
[xiv] Chris King, (129)
[xv] Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
[xvi] Karen Barad, 2012. “What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Nothingness.” Hatje Cantz.
[xvii]Gelonesi, Joe, interview with Jairus Grove. 2016. “Spooky action is closer than you think.” The Philosopher’s Zone.
[xviii] Iraqi, A. (2024, April 25). “Lavender”: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza. +972 Magazine, April 3. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
[xix] McKernan, Bethan and Harry Davies. 2024. “‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets.” The Guardian, April 3.
[xx] ET Online. 2024. “How Israel is using ‘Lavender’ and ‘Daddy’ to identify 37,000 Hamas operatives.” The Economic Times, April 9.
[xxi]Chinen, Nate. 2023. “Irreversible Entanglements, Nuclear War.” NPR
[xxii] Sun Ra. 1984. Nuclear War.