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Libby Heaney

Ent-, 2022

Ed. of 2/5 + 2 AP

5 channel immersive projection, 4 channel sound, 10 min video version and interactive playable application

Dimensions variable

Ent- delves into the transformative potential of quantum computing and its future impact on humans and non-humans.  Ent- was the first iteration of Heaney’s exploration of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. It is an immersive experience that invites audience members, who now replace the figures in Bosch's painting, to feel like quantum particles. perhaps destabilized by the encompassing projection. Ent- has showcased at prestigious museums like HEK Basel, ZKM Karlsruhe and numerous others. It was originally commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, Berlin.

Heaney uses her self-written quantum computing code to manipulate and animate her own watercolour paintings, centering and celebrating hybrid creatures inspired by Bosch’s medieval monsters, landscapes that seem to shift and breathe, and exploding structures that float and re-form. Heaney chose to work with watercolour in particular because of its dream-like aesthetic and the magical bleeding of colours into one another reflects the merging and blurring of the quantum world.

Ent- brings  audiences closer to quantum’s materiality, to see and feel what it means to be in a superposition – in two or more states at once. These new quantum ways of being are starting points to reimagine our material existence and contemplate possible futures away from binary categorisations. 

ABOUT Libby Heaney

Dr Libby Heaney is an award winning artist with a professional background in Quantum Science. She is the first artist to work with quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium. Heaney’s practice explores quantum concepts and temporalities, combining diverse media such as moving image, glass and watercolour with cutting-edge technologies. In doing so she seeks to entangle interior landscapes with the impact of the exterior realm, asking big philosophical questions while remaining intimate, human and embodied. Recent solo exhibitions include Quantum Soup, HEK, Basel (2024); Heartbreak and Magic, Somerset House, London (2024) and Ent-, LAS Art Foundation, Berlin (2022). Her first artistic monograph was recently published by Hatje Cantz. Heaney’s project Ent- won the Lumen Prize and the Falling Walls Art-Science Prize (both 2022) and she was awarded the 2022 Mozilla Foundation Creative Media Award. Heaney has been the recipient of numerous Arts Council England grants, completed a residency at Somerset House Studios, London, and is in major private collections including Zabludowicz Collection and 0xCollection. Heaney holds a PhD in Quantum Information Science and worked as a post-doctoral researcher in quantum science at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. She also holds a MA in Art and Science from Central St. Martins, London.

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