Kaspar Ravel is an artist, researcher, and curator. His approach is one of research and creation, whose works represent a “poetical” attempt to rethink our technologies.
Without claiming to resolve the technical condition of the Anthropocene, his work operates on two levels. First symbolic, then tactical: as an heir to the hacker culture and activist of the 1990s, Kaspar sees the personal computer and the internet as a field of semiotic experimentation, but also a theater of potential electrical disturbances, a place whose boundaries are constantly being negotiated between devices and their users.
Further to a desire to create safer, low-tech, and accessible technologies, his main collaborations are with academia, embassies, public institutions, hacklabs, makerspaces, and NGOs, with whom the artist develops discursive and algorithmic tools in the context of workshops or site-specific residencies.

For several years, Kaspar Ravel has been exploring affective artifacts, sensory forms resulting from our interactions with technology. For his third year of residency, he is focusing on unconventional computing, particularly quantum computing, which he approaches simultaneously as a scientific, cultural, and poetic phenomenon.
In collaboration with researchers in physics, philosophy, and information science (QICS, LPENS, Sorbonne University), he questions the cognitive and symbolic upheavals linked to these new technologies. He is also interested in the diffusion of the term “quantum” outside the scientific field, particularly in alternative medicine and mysticism.
The work presented is a computer without electronics. Finely cut sheets of paper and metal modulate light to generate interference patterns: a visual metaphor for quantum information processing. Each layer acts as a step in an algorithm. At the intersection of low-tech and cutting-edge research, this machine offers a different way of thinking about computing—sensitive, analog, almost artisanal—that questions our relationship with past, present, and future technologies.

At the Wagner Gallery, the machine is no longer presented as a whole, but as a series of delicate organs, disassembled and exposed. Each layer of metal and paper is suspended like an individual work, each representing a computational step frozen in space. In this configuration, we no longer watch the light pass through the machine; on the contrary, we are the light at the heart of the machine. The visitor’s journey is then comparable to that of a photon, altered at each threshold crossed. A diffraction, a memory. Around the pieces, plotter prints reflect this silent activity. They make visible what is usually invisible: the minute interferences, the patterns of error, the nuances produced by the dialogue between light and matter. These prints are abstract, like X-rays of an invisible process, and reveal the raw results of the machine.