In Pursuit of the Quantum Imaginary
(last edited: 2026)
author(s): Nadia Armstrong
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Armstrong's practice based PhD is a cyborg-feminist study of the forms of knowledge which operate within technoscientific research ecosystems. Adopting an agential realist framework, it observes the ways in which forms of knowledge come into being through the collective imaginaries they are informed by.
Situated in CONNECT, Taighde Éireann’s Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications, this project takes a hybrid, transdisciplinary approach, blending creative practice with critical theory from the field of science and technology studies. Sheila Jasanoff’s analytical concept of the sociotechnical imaginary refers to visions of the future moulded by technological trajectories. Via auto-ethnographic engagement with researchers working in the field of Quantum Communications, Armstrong accesses the sociotechnical imaginaries in operation in CONNECT’s quantum-based research network. Using Jasanoff’s co-productionist framework, the project is rooted in an understanding of the entangled and mutually constitutive ordering of scientific knowledge and social order. Through an interview process that draws upon technopaganism, a movement that binds esoteric practices to the digital means, Armstrong taps into her research subjects’ visions and sensibilities towards the world of quantum physics.
The practice based aspect of this PhD harnesses para-fictioning, world-building and speculative fiction to build a hybrid multimedia installation that pursues the quantum imaginary. Parafictioning is a process through which fact and fiction are set against each other, their boundaries blurred, both foregrounded as knowledge. This project reinstates othered forms of knowledge that classically operate outside of the technoscientific paradigm; forms of knowledge that rely on instinct, intuition, feeling, belief, imagination and a sense of immanence.
