ON UNCERTAINTY: A GRAPHIC VIEW ON ITS FORMS
“El principio” in Spanish means “the beginning”. This word is part of the Spanish translation of the Uncertainty Principle, “El principio de incertidumbre”. It was in March of 1927 when the 24-year-old German physicist Werner Heisenberg embarked on exactly that: the beginning of his decisive contribution to the newly formulated quantum mechanics. “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik” was the title of the paper he published in volume 43 of Zeitschrift für Physik. In just 27 pages, he demonstrated one of the central ideas in quantum theory: the Uncertainty Principle.
In English, the word principle unfortunately loses this connection to origin. Yet it retains a deep meaning, referring to a fundamental truth or a rule that underlies a system of beliefs. The mathematical apparatus that grounds the Uncertainty Principle, rigorously and widely accepted, is formulated in an abstract language that is mostly inaccessible to the general public. Heisenberg’s paper can be seen as a formula, as analogies, or even experimental setups that prove its validity, but never as a gesture that renders its abstract dimension as an object to be contemplated. In that sense, the Uncertainty Principle, as a quantum phenomenon, sits in a delimited representation for most readers, obscure. This matters because the principle challenges our classical understanding of reality by setting a fundamental limit of knowledge in nature, influencing all interpretations of our reality. It is in this tension between “observing” and “understanding” that this research project is situated.
It offers an exercise in the pursuit of the meaning of the Uncertainty Principle and suggests that its mathematical apparatus can be explored in ways to give form to that abstraction, to transform and make visible an intangible quantum phenomenon. To do this, the research proposes to treat its equations and mathematical scheme as if they were concrete poetry, allowing their symbols, structures
THE UNCERTAINTY JOURNAL
I suppose that, like most people, I’m drawn to finding a way to leave a trace, something that captures the process. The journal began without any grand pretensions; it existed without a clear destination, existing in its own uncertainty. It was a journal where thoughts, emotional states, and parallel situations converged; it was the life of the thesis. For 223 days, I kept a record of everything that happened during the progress of this thesis. The first moment of the day: opening the MacBook, writing down the time, and the first thought that crossed my mind. It was an auto ethnographic exercise that bore witness to the emotional and practical process.
As a second and parallel record exercise, I developed the uncertainty countdown character. It traced the development of the written thesis in quantitative terms. Each writing day, the cumulative character count is recorded; the countdown then represents this progress in reverse, as a subtraction from a target of 100,000 characters. Writing about uncertainty in a thesis does not involve accumulating text, but rather a constant reduction of the unknown. This process, expressed numerically through arithmetic operation, quantitatively reveals the conditions of uncertainty. Both exercises were a constant dialogue between not knowing and not deciding.
① MASTER’S THESIS
MA VISUAL COMMUNICATION 2026
ZURICH UNIVERSITY OF ARTS
ON CONCRETE EQUATIONS
EXHIBITION
237 A5 PAGES
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470 A5 PAGES
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739 A3 PAGES
TYPEFACE UNIVERS
+ EDITORIAL DESIGN
+ RESEARCH
+ PHOTOS
+ MENTOR(S)
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND.
SILVANA APONTE
CHANGQIAO WANG DR. PHIL. BJÖRN FRANKE
PROF. DR. SARAH OWENS
“The knowledge of what we don’t know seems to expand faster than our catalog of breakthroughs. The known unknowns outstrip the known knowns. And it is those unknowns that drive science. Science is a living, breathing subject because of all those questions we can’t answer.”
—Marcus Du Sautoy, The great unknown.