Smudge Brush : Erasing the Known, Revealing the Unknown
The MOTH Quantum Brush includes Aquarela, Heisenbrush, Smudge brush, and Collage: A New Era for Digital Art Driven by Quantum Algorithms.
MOTH, a quantum technology company, introduced Quantum Brush, an open-source digital painting application that employs quantum computing to create unique artworks. This groundbreaking application converts artists' brushstrokes into quantum algorithms to explore how quantum effects might create unique aesthetics, expanding art, media, and generative design.
History has seen technology advancements like oil paints, photography, and machine learning expand artistic possibilities. In this tradition, Quantum Brush asks: Is there a quantum aesthetic or artistic style? João Ferreira, a researcher at MOTH and one of the paper's authors, claims that Quantum Brush lets artists deal with the “strange and beautiful mathematics of the quantum world” without a deep understanding of quantum mechanics.
Four Quantum Realities, Four Brushes
The initial Quantum Brush release includes Aquarela, Heisenbrush, Smudge, and Collage, each of which explores how quantum processes effect visuals. These brushes work on IQM's Sirius device and are compatible with noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. These gadgets' hardware noise is intentionally added to add a quantum aspect and create unique, non-reproducible visual outputs.
Aquarela: Complex Colours With Fluid Blends
The Aquarela brush, inspired by translucent watercolour paintings, blends colours rather than combining them. Every painted line is a quantum interaction, and the brush's influence depends on the canvas's state and path. Through quantum logic, brush and canvas communicate, causing subtle and original colour alterations. Applying Aquarela on Paul Cézanne's 1895 self-portrait showed colour convergences (such as green and red tones) on real hardware that were not evident in noiseless simulations.
Hisenbrush: Quantum Dynamics Visualisation
The Heisenbrush creates visual patterns using quantum observables' simulated temporal evolution. Its expressive power comes from quantum systems evolving under specified quantum time evolutions, not classical randomness. Quantum systems' invisible mathematical structure can be used by artists to visualise quantum science.
In Robert Delaunay's “L'homme à la tulipe,” the brush combines well with vivid colour schemes, creating strokes that interact with the original artwork through entanglement, superposition, and non-classical evolution. It offers discrete (each stroke is a time step) and continuous (single stroke split into time steps) variants with colour changes tied to the magnetisation of a one-dimensional spin-1/2 Heisenberg model.
Explore Quantum Information Erasure with Smudge Brush
The Smudge brush discovers how quantum systems create new, entangled colours through information erasure. In order to remove colour information, the brush develops new entangled colours that get transferred along the stroke. Smudge was used to create shapes with unique, highly intertwined colours for Henri Matisse's “L'escargot” to maximise expressivity and versatility.
Due to dephasing noise, Sirius' Smudge often produced darker colours (dark browns and greens) but also bright greens that weren't seen in simulations. An uneven quantum cascade induced by an ancilla qubit applying amplitude damping/pumping channel dissipates just the brush tip.
Collage: No-Cloning Theorem Navigation
The Collage brush illustrates the no-cloning theorem, which states that an unknown quantum state cannot be exactly copied without collapsing the original. When replicating a section of an image, collage must measure the information lost against the new copy's fidelity. Users can choose a “copy” and “paste” region to encode RGB content into a qubit with the brush.
Universal asymmetric quantum cloning (UAQC) creates an imperfect duplicate. With Alfons Maria Mucha's "Les Saisons," collage revealed how to create serial art themes with varied levels of authenticity by adjusting internal colour correlations while retaining structural features. The colour disparities between simulations and real device runs show that Collage is vulnerable to noise due to an exponentiation step.
Designed for Artists, All Welcome
Quantum Brush is open-source and standalone. Artists may load photographs, set brushes and parameters, and create strokes using its image editing-like interface. On quantum devices, a “Stroke Manager” controls strokes for parallel execution. Only modified pixels are applied after quantum processing, and a canvas snapshot is recorded. This lets artists test quantum computing stochasticity and re-execute strokes.
To map hue and brightness to spherical angles (ϕ, θ) of a single-qubit state, the program uses the HSL paradigm to encode colour information. While mapping colours to quantum states is difficult, this “quantum-native, NISQ-compatible” technique ensures creative control.
Early collaborator Roman Lipski, a Berlin artist, called his instrument meeting a “dialogue” From exploration to control, the Quantum Brush challenged long-held habits and inspired new creative pathways with its unusual behaviours and changes. Other brushes added details, but Collage allowed for more extensive modifications, and a pressure-sensitive tablet was essential for accurate control.
Quantum Brush offers the first step towards a powerful tool that employs quantum mechanics to create invisible visual art. The research adds to the growing connection between quantum science and artistic expression by anticipating applications in visual effects, generative media, and immersive experiences like virtual reality.
MOTH wants scientists, artists, and “dreamers alike” to submit brushes, algorithms, and ideas to the open-source initiative to foster a collaborative quantum aesthetics movement that combines art and quantum physics. This initiative tries to humanise digital art and display quantum processes' abstract beauty.
