on the other hand of an applet and a screen. The screen displays different energy and discretization levels in x and y direction, generated by the applet and the motion on the stool. By rocking forth on the stool the images of the energy levels belong to finer quantized states and by rocking backwards to coarser quantizations- i.e. the images look more "pixelated". Rocking left meant showing energy states with lower energy and and by rocking right the applet showed higher energy states of the quantum pendulum.
The installation was unsucessfully submitted to Hofer Preis 2001 and else only shown in rogue Berlin offsite locations. For the Hofer Preis the installation was envisaged to be enlarged to two stools and two screens next to each other - one screen was to show recorded image sequences of the applet, the other screen showed direct interaction imagery. The irritation whether oneself or the neighbour perceives an image according to the rocking motion or not, was intended and served as an contemplation about wholesomeness and the perception of the fuzzy and the unknown and foreign.
physics: The quantum pendulum is a quantum version of the discrete nonlinear pendulum, or for those aquainted with quantum mechanics: a discrete nonlinear harmonic oscillator. The images display the Husimi function, i.e. a kind of phase space image of the corresponding energy eigenstates. The discrete quantum pendulum was introduced in the joint work:
"The discrete quantum pendulum", Alexander Bobenko, Nadja Kutz, Ulrich Pinkall Phys. Lett. A 187 (1994) 365-372
->see also blog entry about heim@pendel