The Interview | Libby Heaney

Since she started using quantum technology to make art, Libby Heaney has patented an elusive aesthetic that expresses the hybrid nature of life after the digital. Having worked as a physicist for more than a decade, Heaney turned her knowledge of quantum information science to the production of works in a variety of media that reveal the fluidity and instability of the quantum world. 

At a time when national governments are on the hunt to develop quantum computers according to military-industrial imperatives, Heaney’s work explores quantum’s other potential to disrupt traditional knowledge regimes including time, space, and techno-capitalism. In this conversation with Alex Estorick, the artist explains why quantum computing heralds the end of representation.

Alex Estorick: You’ve described yourself as probably the first artist to work with quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium. What are the aesthetic, conceptual, or other creative affordances of this technology? 

Libby Heaney: I’ve been working with quantum computing since IBM first put their small, noisy devices online for public use in 2019. Full-scale quantum computers that can compute any quantum algorithm don’t yet exist, but big tech companies and governments around the world are racing to be the first to build them because they will be able to solve problems that are not possible with a digital computer. 

AE: So when we’re talking about quantum, we’re talking about a postdigital imaginary? 

LH: Yes. Quantum is an ontologically different class of computing, not simply more of the same. Instead, it functions based on the laws of quantum physics that describe the microscopic world of atoms, subatomic particles like the electron, and some molecules, whereas digital is based on much bigger systems. I work with quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement, which you can do with the quantum technology that is currently available.

Another feature of quantum physics that sounds almost magical is that when a measuring device records information about a quantum system, it randomly collapses that system back to being digital or binary. It goes from being quantum, which is plural, entangled, and holds the potential to morph into different possibilities, back to how we observe the world. This means that whenever you work with quantum technologies as an artist, you always depend on digital technologies anyway; even when you’re using a nonbinary technology the outcome is still binary.

Some artists are using quantum to replicate the existing world, which is just digital art using a different tool. I’m interested in using quantum technology to create a new aesthetics based on the materiality of the quantum world. 

I’m not interested in illustrating the quantum world; I’m interested in the self and the nature of the human experience and how we can entangle more deeply with nature, others, and ourselves, using quantum as a lens or prism through which to reimagine the systems we’re in. I draw on my own personal experiences, particularly in relation to psychology, mental health, and relationships. I often use movement to tickle my soul to reveal little threads of my subconscious. I want to build an aesthetic that communicates the complexity of human existence, inviting audiences to experience wonder, oblivion, as well as what it might mean to be, for instance, both alive and dead — to comprehend experiences that don’t make sense to rational minds. At its core, quantum is beyond representation.

In 2021, I used one of IBM’s quantum computers to generate a set of random numbers and then used Processing to cycle through iterations of different hybrid life forms in a somewhat similar way to the surrealist cut-up technique. These formed the basis of my immersive work Ent- (2022). I used quantum computing to animate scanned watercolor paintings of these hybrids, highlighting the unbounded, nonlocal, and cyclical nature of quantum. However, the animations are just a trace of what the quantum world would look like if we could see it. The work I exhibited at Frieze London Ent- (non-earthly delights) (2024) is one of my quantum hybrids that took the form of a 3x3-meter sculpture with two AR (augmented reality) experiences.

‍AE: I suppose a hybrid approach makes sense if you’re trying to express an ontology that evades representation. Can you walk us through your process?

LH: I journal; I draw; I paint. I also use 3D modeling to rough out forms in Blender, iterating on different bodies with gold tentacles or petals or other leitmotifs. For the Frieze project, I worked with a long-standing collaborator, Gabriel Stones, to refine the form of my sculpture before it was carved by a CNC machine. I also created two AR experiences that people could access using a QR code, animating the sculpture such that it became fluid in a way characteristic of quantum aesthetics. 

Anyone can use IBM’s quantum computers if they sign up online. A couple of years back I did a lot of computations and saved a number of spreadsheets of numbers based on the wave-like properties of quantum entanglement which I can apply to new works. I also develop quantum videos where I layer together maybe 32 or 64 different videos that are all playing at the same time with different degrees of visual transparency and opacity, which is determined by the quantum entanglement data. My work Never Too Much (2023) is one example.

If the quantum world didn’t collapse into randomness, what you would see is a layered potentiality of wave-like patterns, which is why I often use slime as a metaphor.

AE: Would it be fair to call this work “generative art” given your reliance on an autonomous system?

LH: It is generative art but in a quantum way. It would be great to have live access to quantum computers but I don’t, so I save data to simulate aliveness. 

I’m interested in the quantum nature of self, which is plural and composed of many, almost competing, parts. 

If we practice different ways of being we can actually sit and experience different contradictory emotions and states at the same time, which fits the technical definition of quantum superposition where one atom is in multiple contradictory states at the same time. It also stops us from collapsing back into rigid categories. Never Too Much consists of real footage of my mouth cropped with lips painted blue or green and me gagging myself and regurgitating slime in different colors. Then I layer up 32 different videos all at the same time, and different versions of me come in and out of being depending on the data from the quantum computer. It looks quite monstrous with a blurry aesthetic — nothing is certain and everything is unstable, performative, and shapeshifting. 

Superposition and the experience of simultaneity is present in all of my works with watercolor, which carry the fluidity and instability of the quantum world. With Longing, Mattering (2024) I was thinking about different relationships past, present, and into the future. I paint on the horizontal so that the water pools, like magical Petri dishes, and you lose control over what’s going to come out, so there is a level of randomness. You can see this layering of different realities, lights, and shadows — different possibilities happening at once. 

AE: Whether you’re working in 2D or 3D, there remains a pulsing logic.

LH: Yeah, it’s like nothing ever really settles. I often use the word “shapeshifting” because quantum particles exist over a range of contradictory variables. 

Imagine a stress ball. If I squeeze it hard in one direction, the ends pop out the top and bottom of my hand and become bigger. In a quantum reality, pairs of complementary parameters like energy and time are linked and stretchy; so if a particle has a fixed energy — like my hand squeezing a stress ball tightly — then time becomes extended. The particle exists both into the past and into the future at once.

AE: In her essay on artists working with quantum computing, Beth Jochim highlighted your work Venuses (quantum bodies watched by Open Pose algorithm) (2021), which challenges the standardization of the nude by artists such as Titian. Do you see quantum disrupting canonical knowledge regimes, including time and space, that have shaped western histories of science and art since the Enlightenment? And do you infer quantum logics from the work of other artists?

LH: Quantum thinking and feeling can absolutely disrupt hierarchical modes of knowing and being in the world. Artists usually use the word “entanglement” to infer connection but quantum entanglement is much more radical as it is a nonlocal, layered superposition of all possible ways of connecting existing at the same time. It can therefore disrupt pre-existing ethics, epistemologies, and ontologies in new plural ways. 

Quantum physics is a material theory that describes things, but not in the same way that we think about things as objects that are solid or bounded entities. Quantum is not common sense.

Artists who already have a quantum logic include Heather Phillipson, whose Tate Britain commission, Rupture No. 1: blowtorching the bitten peach (2021) was wonderful. She incorporates different parallel narratives at the same time without collapsing into specific meanings or being too positional. Umberto Eco talks about quantum particles in his discussion of the “open work,” while Roy Ascott wrote a lot about telematic systems, connecting quantum to cybernetics. 

Physical sculpture is tricky because it’s essentially fixed in macroscopic (non-quantum) reality but that makes it an interesting way of approaching quantum because it forces you to see how close you can get. That’s why I’m interested in glass, which reminds me of a quantum particle when molten. I have a lovely clear glass piece called Growler (2024) that’s like a snail’s body or slime oozing off a plinth. Because it’s clear glass it’s both there and not there and it holds the light so it becomes animated and subjective, changing its shape when observed in different ways. 

‍AE: Is indeterminacy part of this quantum vision that you’re expressing? 

LH: Indeterminacy and uncertainty. There’s an inherent and irreducible unknowability and a type of being and non-being in the quantum sphere but also a potentiality — there is something there. It’s not speculation but we also can’t know it fully. 

There are lots of synergies between quantum and art. Quantum theory has never been falsified in experiments; it’s probably one of the best-tested scientific theories in the world. While it is seemingly counterintuitive, all scientists get from tests is more evidence that quantum is in fact an accurate description of microscopic reality. I see quantum mechanics almost as a wildness, and I use the word “queer” a lot. 

Quantum teaches us that we should be happy in uncertainty and more accepting of things that are fluid and unknowable rather than trying to bound or categorize them. At the same time, quantum sensors afford greater precision than digital or classical tools. 

AE: I’m interested that you use the terms digital and classical interchangeably. Are digital systems already legacy systems?

LH: I’m using “classical,” meaning Newtonian — which is how scientists would use the term — in contrast to quantum. 

AE: Contemporary artists often reveal the social implications of emerging technologies. What alternative realities or socialities might quantum imply that might disrupt familiar extractive patterns? 

LH: With my work Q is for Climate (?) (2023) I’m thinking about how quantum physics can help us rethink the climate in terms of circular economies and nonlinear temporalities, while also highlighting how quantum technologies will exacerbate the climate crisis due to the need for new generations of lithium-ion batteries and therefore an extractive economy. 

Rather than optimizing for humans, we need to rethink the planet as belonging to humans, animals, nature, and the economy all at once in horizontal terms. 

‍AE: At a time when national governments are seeking to instrumentalize Quantum 2.0 for military purposes, it sounds like you are using quantum to move beyond anthropocentrism.

LH: I think we need to become slimy creatures who avoid dominance by dissolving our own boundaries so that we can avoid detection by surveillance systems. The idea of quantum nonlocality — of simultaneous positionality and nonlocality — is very important. Artists working with quantum need to resist falling back into binaries and fixed categories. A genuinely quantum imaginary should not be fixed; it must be shapeshifting and ever-evolving. 

AE: I can’t think of anything more beguiling than slime, but new media art has often fetishized emerging technology by presenting it in the form of seductive environments that desensitize or pacify audiences. How do you find a balance between making your works engaging while maintaining the unknowability and indeterminacy of quantum, which is not about fixed positions or subject-object relations? 

LH: I’m aware of the critique of immersive experiences and how spectacle connects to capital, not least by being Instagrammable. People like to photograph the high-resolution graphics in my work, but Q is for Climate (?), for example, is very blurry owing to quantum layering, whereby all focal points are removed. People don’t like to photograph those quantum moments because they elude human vision as well as surveillance. You feel disoriented when you’re in these immersive experiences because the world around you becomes blurry, doubled, dissolved, and delocalized. It’s very difficult to capture such sensations with a recording device.

‍AE: The idea of creating an indeterminate position for both viewer and artist feels exciting. 

LH: It’s not an oscillation between two positions either, it’s actually layers upon layers of reality and unreality. My interactive VR work Heartbreak and Magic (2024), which was commissioned by VIVE Arts and exhibited at Somerset House, is really beautiful and meaningful to me because it touches on the grief surrounding the loss of my sister to suicide in 2019 and the magic of quantum that helped me reconnect with her somehow. Because I’m not religious, I find comfort in imagining her still existing somewhere in the multiverse, which quantum physics predicts. 

Heartbreak and Magic situates the audience as if in a quantum multiverse where time becomes nonlinear and you find yourself going back through experiences you’ve already had and experiencing multiple viewpoints at once. Abstract versions of my sister are visible at the end of the work: both being and non-being at once. Quantum patterning (from IBM’s quantum computers) determines this indeterminate form of experience.

AE: Which words should we not be using to discuss your art because it does upend a lot of canonical reference points that we have come to depend on. 

LH: I’m against fixed representation, but I am happy to make representational work as long as it’s hybrid. Even though Ent- (non-earthly delights) is a sculpture, it comprises multiple reference points and there’s an AR component layered over it, which introduces multiple viewpoints. 

We need to get rid of the word “representation” because in quantum physics you can’t copy. I speak of performativity rather than representation. 

Quantum information science involves something called the no-cloning theorem. As soon as information becomes quantum — that is, encoded in  superposition or entanglement — you can’t copy it anymore. That has military applications. If I put some drops of red food coloring in the ocean, I will never get that red coloring back out again but the red molecules will remain in the ocean. By contrast, a measurement on a quantum superposition collapses the quantum reality back to binary, so unlike the dispersed red food coloring, which still exists, the quantum system is destroyed. Inside a fault-tolerant quantum computer and in other pure quantum systems, there is zero entropy and zero waste, which prompted Q is for Climate (?). It also means that, within these systems, you can go forward and backward in time and exist in multiple different spatial states at once.

AE: Would you say you adopt a playful approach to quantum?

LH: I like to invite surprise in the audiences of my work. Last year, I made my first sound installation Qlimate Tongues (2024) made up of eight channels. It considered the non-hierarchical nature of quantum and the fact that lots of possibilities can exist at once. I used a quantum sequencer that I had coded using quantum computing to move playfully between eight speakers’ different hybrid voices, including human and nonhuman chanting. I also used a wave-GAN (generative adversarial network) trained on my own dataset of recorded Gregorian and Kirtan chanting as well as football chants from my old favorite team, West Bromwich Albion. I looked at the waveforms of the recordings and found similarly shaped waveforms from birdsong and the sound of water lapping. I then went to Imperial College in London and made further recordings of lab equipment, which sounded like minimal techno. I put it all into a dataset, trained the model, and explored the latent space vector by vector, discovering points where the different channels crossed over — where voices became hybrids of humans, birds, water, etc.

‍AE: I’m fascinated by the idea that quantum can help us to visualize latent space that is otherwise invisible to human eyes.

LH: There is a pattern but it’s a quantum pattern.

I believe that reality is hybrid; it’s not one thing or another, it’s everything and nothing. If that sounds like a binary it just reflects the problem of using language in this domain. I’m more interested in quantum feeling in order to capture something beyond words.  

AE: Are you conscious of a difference between being the first mover and being a pioneer? I’ve tended to be skeptical of artists who’ve benefited from being first or having privileged access to new technologies. But, in your case, it feels like you are shaping the grammar of how other artists might approach quantum. 

LH: What I wish to stress for your readers is the need to push the radical potential of quantum not just in the arts but as a way of reimagining societal structures and image-based material cultures. I’m blessed with a background in quantum information science, which the majority of artists don’t have and so their exploration of quantum probably requires a level of collaboration. 

I don’t depend on collaboration because I spent 12 years working as a physicist before going to art school.

My artworks aren’t educational tools, but through my interviews and social media channels I hope to open up portals for other creatives to understand the true depth of quantum at a time when digital culture is all based on making copies of copies. I’m working on a new project Primordials based on these ideas that is set for release later this year.