You are now quantum, a packet of pure energy, coupled with the flirty fluctuations of a zero point, the void.

– Libby Heaney, slimeQore performance, 2022

Seductively spinning golden looms, cascading black tar-like substances, lips smeared in blue and green pigments mouthing silent words, all increasingly subsumed and merged beneath gauzy membranes of rippling snail flesh and mucus. What is slimeQrawl saying?

A pioneering voice at the intersection of art and quantum physics, multimedia artist Libby Heaney makes visible, tangible – and often audible – the strange qualities and significant real-world implications of quantum computing. Building from her PhD and background of extensive professional research into theoretical quantum information science, Heaney creates moving-image installations, performances and sculptural works that investigate the contested ecological, political and social implications of an entirely new technological realm.

What do we mean by ‘quantum’, and what are the specific aspects Heaney responds to and works with? In short, and paraphrasing from Heaney’s many insightful expositions on the topic, quantum computers process information using the laws of quantum physics rather than the laws of Newtonian physics – which underpin our digital infrastructure. Digital computation is based on the binary system of 0 and 1, where units of information (bits) can only exist in either of the binary states. It’s a fixed ontology that Heaney argues has led to a mechanical, limited way of perceiving the world. In quantum computing, however, a quantum-bit (or qubit) can exist in both 0 and 1 simultaneously, enabling objects to do multiple things at once. This parallel, multidimensional quality is what gives quantum computers such a huge advantage in processing speed over purely linear digital computers. A problem that might take hundreds of years to solve on a digital supercomputer might only take a few hours on a quantum one.¹

*Libby Heaney: slimeQore, 2022. Among the Machines, Zabludowicz Collection, London. Courtesy the artist and Zabludowicz Collection. Photo by Richard Eaton*

It’s important to note that full-scale quantum computers don’t yet exist. However, governments and Big Tech companies are at this moment engaged in a furious dash to be the first to develop them, involving huge financial investment. Harnessed and used positively, quantum computing might allow problem-solving on a scale that could unlock seemingly intractable problems, such as the production of clean energy on a large scale. While acknowledging this potential, Heaney is keen to point out the – sadly more likely – misuse of newly wielded power. History has shown that industrial capitalism uses new tools to extract: harder, faster, stronger.

An exponential acceleration in processing speed is not the core attraction for Heaney in centring her artistic experiments around quantum. Instead, it is the implication of a new paradigm of non-binary superposition and entanglement, whereby particles, in the extreme cold inside a quantum computer, exist in multiple states or places at once (this concept may be recognisable from the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics found in popular culture, such as 2022’s Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once) or join together in wavelike ways that are hard to verbalise or visualise. One metaphor for such entanglement and quantum ‘particles’, where no boundary exists between inside and outside, is a constant flow of a porous liquid. Heaney has speculatively imagined and categorised this as ‘slime’. Here she draws on the negative associations of the word in relation to manipulative human behaviour (hello again, Big Tech) and the common human sense of disgust at the interior, mucky aspects of our own bodies. Crucially, however, such negativity is subverted with a celebration of slime as an agent that dissolves the borders between individual and collective agency, and between the human and other species.

Slime recurs throughout Heaney’s recent practice, as a palpable metaphor for the theory of entanglement. It takes the form of interactive materiality for the audience in the spoken-word and video performance slimeQore (2022); as a green computer-generated image spilling over a rendered quantum computer in a number of her film works; as a perfectly formed glass sculpture slipping off the end of its pedestal; and finally, layered through quantum video processes to a state of abstraction in the new slimeQrawl installation.

Slime is a swelling, flexing, breathing mucus. It is a remnant of the natural world, and through its tactile qualities it points to systems of intelligence embedded within it. Classical entanglement exists all around us: in the mycelia of fungi that form a network underneath the forest floor, sending messages between trees; in the unique migratory patterns of birds; and in the fact that some slime moulds can solve spatial efficiency problems more readily than computers.² The poetic intersection between digital and natural networks is encapsulated through these systems. Almost beyond our ability to comprehend, they are prompts to actively look outside ourselves to the complexity that is all around us. Accepting and understanding the multiple entities converging and cooperating creates a new methodology of thinking, living and being. As a different ontological category entirely, quantum entanglement takes this further. If slime mould behaved in a quantum fashion, it would exist in all possible spatial configurations – expanding, contracting, branching left, branching right – at the same time. These would be layered over each other in a type of multiverse, a phenomenon hinted at in the multiple layers of video in slimeQrawl.

Libby Heaney, Ent- (Many Path Version) (2022) held at Gazelli Art House, London

Heaney intuitively connects to her audience using slime as the embodiment of quantum. Recently she invited audience members to an interactive immersive gaming environment titled Ent- (Many Path Version) (2022) held at Gazelli Art House, London, which was navigated by an Xbox controller that rested patiently on a slimly monstrous sculpture between players. Prior to this, she has placed slime directly into the hands of audience members. Commissioned by the Zabludowicz Collection in 2022 as part of the programme of events accompanying the exhibition Among the Machines, the piece slimeQore was an immersive video montage and spoken narrative. It involved the projection of images over the top of the installed exhibition, like a layer of new material oozing in from the roof of the gallery space. The image-editing process used in the making of the video was a precursor to that used in the new slimeQrawl video, harnessing IBM’s five-qubit quantum computing power to produce shimmering layers of imagery as the wavelike peaks and troughs of quantum superposition and entanglement reveal different aspects of the source’s video clips.

Heaney wished to erode the barrier between performer and viewer: to do this, small black boxes containing slime made by Heaney were distributed to the audience, who were encouraged to open them and play with the material at designated points in a spoken text the artist delivered live, seated on a stage, making tactile (and silly and fun) some of the qualities of quantum explored in the performance.

Taking influence from quantum-physicist-turned-feminist-theorist Karen Barad, Heaney used word play to extrapolate the many possible connotations of a sticky, messy materiality that destabilises the divisions between entities. Heaney references Barad’s theory that humans and non-humans emerge through material and tactile relationships, stating: ‘The quantum theory of touching is radically different from the classical explanation. Actually, it is radically queer. Is touching not by its very nature always an involution, invitation, invisitation, wanted or unwanted of the stranger within? A quantum queering of identity.’³ Heaney’s use of the term ‘queer’ when framing her work builds on Barad’s notion of the radically uncontainable, emphasising the sense of a fundamental unsettling of perceived hierarchies of order, extending beyond human sexuality or gender identity.

The multiplicity of images and meanings contained in Heaney’s practice can be sensed, reacted to, and, on occasion, manipulated. Through a process of abstraction, slime embodies the tangible materiality of the quantum world. It suggests inherently bodily qualities: wet, sexy and feminine. slimeQrawl portrays slime encasing painted lips and being squeezed through the fingers of a manicured hand. Combined, these elements evoke the sensation of ASMR videos on the internet, where women whisper soothingly through social media feeds while demonstrating make-up application or gently squeezing slime. This experience provides a calming, sexualised feeling, transporting its algorithmically fed viewer to an altered state. It’s important to note that the dislocated body parts in the video belong to Heaney, who places herself inside the video rather than reading over the top of images or scripting a narration. Images of these body parts are interwoven with images of other species, specifically close-up shots of the writhing bodies of gastropods: slimeQrawl is overtly feminine in its origin, but is visually queered through the vastness and unknowability of quantum space.

Although complex in their construction, Heaney’s works are not exclusively technical or instructional in emphasis. Instead, they are characterised by their tactility, and the artist’s desire to explore the possible intersections of quantum with the contemporary structures of gender, sex, identity and class. In her immersive world-building practice, Heaney represents phenomena such as entanglement and non-binary states by the playful manipulation of language, narrative constructions and metaphors, such as liquidity and slime. A multivalent critical practice, Heaney’s approach utilises quantum as a tool and a medium with which to question the structures we accept as our reality, and to suggestively hint at the interconnectedness of everything in our world.

Paul Luckraft and Julia Greenway

¹ Glickstein, Adina, 2022, ‘Multiple Matters: An Interview with Libby Heaney’, Spike art magazine, 19 April. https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/multiple-matters-interview-libby-heaney

² Bridle, James, 2022, ‘Non-Binary Machines’, Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence, Penguin Random House.

³ Libby Heaney, script for slimeQore performance, 2022.

Libby Heaney, ‘slimeQrawl’ by Paul Luckraft and Julia Greenway

Seductively spinning golden looms, cascading black tar-like substances, lips smeared in blue and green pigments mouthing silent words, all increasingly subsumed and merged beneath gauzy membranes of rippling snail flesh and mucus. What is slimeQrawl saying?

Zethu Maseko — Where There Is Love and Water, Life Will Live

Interview: Libby Heaney