Libby Heaney 'Ent-'

‘This idea that there’s a plural reality beyond the concrete world that we see every day really excited me.’

– Libby Heaney

Commissioned by LAS (Light Art Space), Ent- is a solo exhibition and artwork by artist and physicist Libby Heaney. ​​Heaney is the only artist in the world using quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium. Ent- is a quantum interpretation of the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1510). By using quantum code, Heaney manipulated her own watercolour paintings into forming hybrid creatures inspired by Bosch’s medieval monsters, landscapes that seem to shift and breathe, and exploding structures that float and re-form.

Created using IBM’s quantum hardware and Qiskit software and animated with the game engine Unreal Engine, Ent- is an immersive installation taking quantum computing as both medium and subject-matter. Designed as a ‘black box’, the exhibition experience engulfs the audience in a 360° projection that takes them through the layers of Bosch’s painting – sky, buildings and landscapes, and water.

‘Working with quantum physics can subvert the endless categorizations and control of humans and non-humans alike in pursuit of never-ending profits, causing accelerating alienation.’

– Libby Heaney

For the artist, Bosch’s adjacent depictions of heaven and hell provide an analogue for the double-edged potential of quantum computing. This emerging technology is expected to create a leap in the possibilities of computing power, exponentially accelerating surveillance capitalism and disrupting existing encryption methods for privacy and data protection. Just as Bosch’s triptych can be read as both a celebration of and warning against desire, Ent- explores the dangers implicit in our thirst for new technologies.

Heaney also investigates the positive potential of ‘thinking quantum’. One of its most important concepts, quantum superposition, allows particles to exist in multiple states or places at once. Quantum entanglement binds particles together in a particular symbiosis unlike anything in the macroscopic world. For Heaney, thinking, experiencing and acting in terms of these new pluralities has the potential to break down binary thinking and political polarisation, engendering community thought that might solve global problems as severe as the climate crisis or allow for new paradigms when considering critical issues such as gender identity.