Between Particles and Poetry: The Making of Laure Prouvost’s ‘WE FELT A STAR DYING’

Laure Prouvost’s installations draw you in through their inventive approaches to storytelling. They unfold across numerous media and senses, and are teeming with poetic connections, fantastical elements, wit, and wordplay. She describes her process as an act of translation — a sensory elaboration of feelings, intuitions, and moments in time. Imaginative new logics and relationships emerge around these perspectives, inviting you to float along alternative currents of time and space, to unlearn everyday codes and structures, and to open yourself to new ways of engaging with topics as complex as kinship, migration, and climate change.

Over the past two years, I’ve had the great pleasure of working closely with Prouvost and a team of collaborators to develop an installation imagining a ‘quantum perspective,’ and the shifts in thinking it would call for. She named this WE FELT A STAR DYING, and it is presented by LAS Art Foundation at Kraftwerk Berlin until May 4, travelling to OGR Torino in the autumn. 

Why quantum? Quantum physics emerged a century ago, challenging deterministic views of reality with the suggestion that the behaviour of particles can never fully be predicted. Primarily describing phenomena at the subatomic scale, quantum physics has rarely captured the broader public imagination beyond the realm of science fiction. Now, some of the largest-scale applications of its principles are beginning to emerge, such as quantum computing, which will have profound effects on the world. 

From the outset of the project, Prouvost was more than receptive to quantum physics’ seemingly counterintuitive logic — for example, the idea that particles can exist in multiple states at once, become linked across distances, and tunnel through energy barriers. She had an intuitive affinity for these principles long before she encountered their scientific explanations, and this can be felt in her work. She also describes being primed by her formative time in the studio of the late artist John Latham, who connected his explorations of time and experience to quantum physics. Latham was a co-founder of Artist Placement Group (APG) in the 1960s, an initiative that embedded artists within government, industrial, and scientific institutions to challenge conventional artistic roles and generate new forms of interdisciplinary thinking. APG, like Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) and other cross-pollinating initiatives of the 1960s, provides a key historical precedent for this project, which developed through Prouvost’s two-year exchange with philosopher Tobias Rees and quantum computing engineer Hartmut Neven.

WE FELT A STAR DYING builds an artistic language around these exchanges. Philosophically, the project explores how quantum physics dissolves many of the binaries that have long structured our thinking, such as technology and nature — that is, elements which can be measured and predicted, and those which can’t. At the level of the particle, these distinctions become less clear. Prouvost centres this perspective of continuity in her video, which explores quantum processes as a shared feature of all matter — whether living or non-living, natural or artificial, near or far. 

Her language is also grounded in the specificity of quantum computing as it exists today, in its early stages of development. In 2024, Prouvost visited Google’s quantum computing lab, run by Neven. During her visit, the computer’s quantum bits (called qubits) were unable to maintain quantum states as a result of a solar flare, affecting the computer’s ability to function properly. The qubits’ extreme level of sensitivity to cosmic activity millions of miles away resonated deeply with her, later inspiring the project’s title, WE FELT A STAR DYING. Neven and Rees also described the fluctuations within quantum computers that occur as a result of qubits’ fragile states, which can introduce errors or variations in measurement outcomes — an effect known as ‘noise.’ As technology companies race to reduce these forms of instability, this commission provides a space to dive into the fragility, sensitivity, and degree of unpredictability that define it — in short, the ‘quantumness’ of quantum computing.

Presenting the project in the industrial space Kraftwerk Berlin — a former power plant — we thought about the profound contrast between the types of machines one would expect to find there and the fluid, fragile machine Prouvost set out to evoke. The site presented an opportunity to ask questions about the wider arc of technological development: What does it mean for machines to be attuned to the universe? How does this change what we understand machines to be?

Prouvost’s installation gestures towards this attunement, and the unique sensitivity and flux of emerging quantum technologies. A large kinetic sculpture with six petal-like limbs gently billows out from a circular core. Stepping through a threshold of tangled threads ringing the core, audiences are invited to lie down and journey along Prouvost’s video, projected overhead. The video was run through a custom AI diffusion model, which incorporates noise Neven recorded from Google’s quantum computer. The quantum AI version of the work has fleeting, abstract qualities which reflect the unpredictable aspects of actual quantum noise. The projection randomly switches between the two versions, as if the system were coming in and out of a quantum state. These shifts introduce a level of unpredictability to the installation by triggering a sound, a flash of light, and sometimes even movement of the sculpture’s limbs. Smaller sculptures in the installation connect cosmic, machinic, and earthly realms through form, material, and scent. Others allude to key environmental factors affecting quantum systems, such as heat and vibration, by adapting the architectural language of the space. Together, these elements offer glimpses, sounds, rhythms, and sensations as openings towards the quantum world.

WE FELT A STAR DYING doesn’t attempt to explain quantum physics or computing; it offers an imaginative and poetic way to feel a shift into quantum thinking. This approach is aimed at opening this perspective to broad audiences, and is supported by a number of ways visitors can dive deeper into the science and current developments. Alongside the installation, a dedicated learning space offers a range of perspectives on the project, quantum physics, affinitive philosophies, and the radical forms of computing emerging today. Throughout the installation’s run, additional events are expanding the conversation, exploring the wider field of quantum technologies — including the motivations, challenges, and geopolitical stakes driving their advancement.

Laure Prouvost is an artist born in Lille, France, and currently based in Brussels. She has exhibited widely, including representing France at the 58th Biennale di Venezia. Prouvost won the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013. She creates immersive installations which suggest a state of personal and collective introspection. Her work is dynamic, intuitive and playful and it operates through layered storytelling, unfolding an assortment of images, sounds, spoken and written phrases. Prouvost plays with humour and unexpected connections, blurring distinctions between fiction and reality in idiosyncratic ways to create worlds where the tangible and reliable is often inverted by the fantastical nature of the artist’s ambiguous narratives. 

Carly Whitefield is a curator specialising in time-based media. She was born in Toronto, Canada, and currently works as Senior Curator at LAS Art Foundation, Berlin. Since joining LAS in 2023, she has curated the projects Laure Prouvost: WE FELT A STAR DYING (2025, Kraftwerk Berlin), Josèfa Ntjam: swell of spæc(i)es (2024, Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia), Lawrence Lek: NOX (2023, Kranzler Eck, Berlin), Marianna Simnett: GORGON (2023, HAU2, Berlin), and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: Pollinator Pathmaker (2023–26, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin). She previously worked as Assistant Curator, International Art, at Tate Modern, London, and Editorial and Research Associate at Oslo Pilot.



Feature image: Laure Prouvost, WE FELT A STAR DYING, 2025. Installation view at Kraftwerk Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by OGR Torino. © 2025 Laure Prouvost. Photo: Andrea Rossetti