We work with both quantum hardware and simulations to build creative systems that explore possibility differently from conventional generation. Superposition, interference, and entanglement become compositional behaviors for discovering relationships, tuning uncertainty, and making surprising new work.
Reading, drafting, remixing, and interpretation offer familiar ways to encounter quantum ideas. Creative writing can turn superposition, interference, and measurement into experiences people can explore before they meet the formal mathematics.
|0⟩ Dickinson
Presented in 2025 public programming at the University of Maryland through interactive Quantum & Arts exhibits.
Selected through the University of Maryland's quantum-and-arts ecosystem to develop creative approaches to quantum computing.
LiteraryDJ exhibited a quantum remixing installation for the Q3 Initiative Qreate event, supported by the Center for Quantum Networks and United Nations International Telecommunications Union.
Hughes |1⟩
We are building playful, public-facing tools where quantum ideas become creative methods artists can test, teach, and perform with.
N° 01Language fields
Interactive word clouds where frequency, influence, and measurement choices reshape the visible language field.
N° 02Readable qubits
State is 79 percent Whitman and 21 percent Dickinson.
Bloch sphere interfaces that help artists and learners feel how a quantum state can move between source texts.
N° 03Collapsed collage
A Burroughs-inspired remix system that uses quantum-inspired choices to slice, recombine, and resolve texts into new lines.
Talk
Andrew W. Smith, Creative Director of LiteraryDJ, was invited to speak at MITH's Digital Dialogues series at the University of Maryland on what quantum computing can offer creative writing and the arts. The talk walked through a poetry system built in IBM's Qiskit, where every word is a quantum state and gates decide which words surface and how they relate.
In this talk, Smith investigates the affordances of quantum computing as a method for creative writing. Drawing from the practice of utilizing Markov Chains in computational poetry, Smith’s research reimagines poetic structures through the lens of quantum mechanics, leveraging principles such as superposition, interference, and entanglement to produce dynamic, probabilistic language.
Using IBM’s Qiskit platform, Smith constructs a custom quantum system in which each word is mapped to a quantum basis state, and poetic relationships are encoded through a series of quantum gates—including Hadamard (H), controlled-Z (CZ), controlled-controlled-Z (CCZ), and rotation gates (RX, RY, RZ). These gates govern not only which words are likely to appear, but also their relations to one another, reinforcing or suppressing semantic patterns across a 512-dimensional state space.
The talk will address both the technical design of the system and its broader conceptual implications, arguing for quantum mechanics as a speculative framework for literary expression. By translating poetic constraints into quantum logics, Smith’s research proposes new approaches to human-computer cowriting — ones that are nonlinear, entangled, and open to collapse. In doing so, it offers a provocation for the future of electronic literature, where language emerges not from deterministic rules but from the strange probabilities of quantum computation.
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Everything LiteraryDJ has made, shown and been funded to do with quantum computing.