What if we could peer beyond the limitations of our perception? As the first Artist to use quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium, Dr. Libby Heaney is leading a timely contemplation on the near-future of lived experience. Prompting thought on determinism, Ent-er the Garden of Forking Paths hinges on the notion of quantum superposition, or “the ability for one thing to be in two or more possibilities at the same time”.

Ent-er the Garden of Forking Paths

Presenting the UK premiere of Ent- (Many Paths Version) (2022), Dr. Libby Heaney’s solo exhibition Ent-er the Garden of Forking Paths unearths the magical computational and artistic potentialities of quantum mechanics

What if we could peer beyond the limitations of our perception? As the first Artist to use quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium, Dr. Libby Heaney is leading a timely contemplation on the near-future of lived experience. Prompting thought on determinism, Ent-er the Garden of Forking Paths hinges on the notion of quantum superposition, or “the ability for one thing to be in two or more possibilities at the same time”.

It is these parallel systems upon which quantum exists – superposition and entanglement being examples – which lend this technology functions and speeds that exponentially surpass the digital. Intensely pursued by governments and big tech companies, quantum’s vast computational ability is set to suffuse our lives. Via experiential, visual languages, shaped using Heaney’s quantum programming, Ent- lets us acclimatise to the eventual; to dip one’s toe into the quantum-age.

In visually referencing Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490-1500), Heaney’s work considers duality and the undetermined. Quantum computation does duality and the undetermined. Quantum computation does away with our current binaries away with out current binaries, introducing alternate and myriad ways of being, and, as the artist imagines, sits somewhere between Bosch’s vivid heaven and hell. Inherently uncontrollable and unknown, liminality can be represented in the glitching and falling away of Heaney’s visuals. Visitors are invited to move in a game scenario, experiencing quantum materiality on their own terms.

As the latest iteration of Heaney’s Ent- series of works, this exhibition continues the artist’s efforts to instigate conversation around quantum technologies within the arts and beyond.

About Libby Heaney

Libby Heaney is an award winning Artist and quantum physicist, who has held solo exhibitions at venues including arebyte Gallery London and Light Art Space Berlin named by Weltkunst as one of the best exhibitions of March 2022 alongside Louise Bourgeois and Jenny Holzer.

Heaney is considered to be the first artist to use quantum computing as a functioning artist medium and her notable quantum artwork Ent- has won the Lumen Prize and the Falling Walls Art-Science Prize, 2022. Other solo and group exhibitions and performances in 2022 include Calder and the 21st Century, Nahmad Contemporary, NYC; a month long public screening, Gwanghwamun Square, Seoul; Biomedia, ZKM, Karlsruhe; Quantum Hivemind, Serpentine, London; and CASCADE, Southbank Centre, London. Heaney was awarded the 2022 Mozilla Foundation Creative Media Award, has been the recipient of numerous Arts Council England grants and is in major private collections including Zabludowicz Collection, London. She is currently a resident artist of Somerset House Studios, London.

Before retraining as an artist at Central St. Martins, London, Heaney completed a PhD in Quantum Information Science at the University of Leeds and led her own research at the University of Oxford, publishing around 20 papers on the topic of quantum entanglement. She won the HSBC and Institute of Physics, UK, Very Early Career Woman Physicist of the year in 2008.