Nancy Burson’s Quantum Observation Videos are one-minute recordings captured in complete darkness. They, are taken from moments of joy when asking the energies around her to gather with friends and family..created during moments of joy in which she invites surrounding energies to gather around friends and family she films. Grounded in scientific observations that photon behavior is altered through acts of observation, these works bring attention to forms of energy that typically remain imperceptible.
Rooted in Burson’s three decade engagement with perceiving and translating these energies through drawing and painting, this video practice continues her effort to render phenomena that exist beyond conventional visibility. Over the past few year,s, new approaches have produced especially vivid and expressive results that more closely align with her observed experience – now presented as unique 1/1 video works on the Ethereum blockchain.
The videos are closely linked to photon-based phenomena observed while documenting Burson’s Quantum Entanglement paintings, where colors appear to shift, pulse, or flash in both daylight and darkness. She refers to this process as photon-ography – the convergence of light (photons) and digital imaging technologies. As with much work engaging perception as medium, the experience is inherently subjective; viewers often report differing color interpretations even when observing the same recording.
Burson’s work is situated within a lineage of artists who have treated light, perception, and signal as primary material – from James Turrell’s perceptual environments to Nam June Paik’s use of electronic interference, and more recent practices that visualize otherwise invisible systems. Yet her approach remains distinct in its intimacy, grounding these investigations in human presence and relational proximity.
Through these works, Burson advances an expanded form of videography – one that leverages the sensitivities of digital sensors to register subtle movements of light and energy typically obscured by visible form. What is typically dismissed as noise or interference is treated here as signal.
Historically, analog television static offered a glimpse of the cosmic microwave background – residual radiation from the Big Bang. Today, digital image noise arises from multiple sources, including electronic interference, heat, and sensor activity. Burson acknowledges these conditions while suggesting that the pulsing patterns captured in her videos may be a result of larger cosmic phenomena, through disturbances in spacetime generated by massive events like black hole collisions. It is these events that seem to engage the more newly discovered gravitational wave background that perpetually echo the cosmological events of the early universepulsing of quantum physics. Its a relitively new phenimena thesuch as the gravitational wave background – disturbances in spacetime generated by massive events like black hole collisions.
Operating at the threshold between artifact and signal, the works articulate a visual language for perceiving photon activity: rhythmic, wave-like oscillations between brightness and darkness – present, yet rarely seen.