Interview: Libby Heaney
Libby Heaney is the recipient of our autumn moving image commission curated by Tony Tremlett and Ruth Waters. The installation, titled slimeQrawl, marks Heaney as the first artist to use quantum computing as an artistic medium.
slimeQrawl by Libby Heaney is Shoreditch Arts Club’s third moving image commission.
slimeQrawl is a new immersive video installation by British artist and quantum physicist Libby Heaney for Shoreditch Arts Club, exploring the fascinating future of quantum computing and its impact on our bodies.
Through a captivating display of slime and enigmatic creatures, the three-channel video invites audiences to envision the behaviour of quantum particles. Utilising an innovative quantum generative technique, slimeQrawl challenges traditional video editing, reminding us of the plural non-binary nature of matter.
The following interview with Libby Heaney is conducted by the london-based curators and creative producers Ruth Waters and Tony Tremlett, marking their third season commissioning Shoreditch Arts Club’s moving image artworks.
Libby Heaney in Berlin, photographed by Andrea Rossetti
RW & TT: To create part of your commission, slimeQrawl, you use quantum computing, and are actually the first artist to use quantum computing as an artistic medium. How does this work? And why did you decide to use this to create the work?
LH: Quantum computing is an entirely new type of computer which is non-binary rather than binary like current digital computing. Full scale quantum computers do not exist yet, because they are really difficult to build. Some small prototype ones are available to use via IBM over the cloud. Quantum computing functions like no other technology, because it processes information using microscopic particles that obey the spooky laws of quantum physics.
Let me try to explain how quantum computing works using an example most people have heard of: the thought experiment Schrödinger's cat, which goes like this: There is a unobserved box with a radioactive quantum particle, some poison and a cat. Because the radioactive particle is quantum, it can be in two states at once: decayed and not-decayed. On one hand, there is a state of the box where the particle has decayed – meaning it releases radiation – triggering the release of the poison, which then kills the cat. On the other hand, the particle has not decayed, the poison has not been released and the cat is still alive. If we believe quantum mechanics applies to macroscopic objects like the cat, then the cat is both dead and alive at the same time, which is very strange.
And things become even weirder, this plural state of reality exists until someone or something opens the box. As soon as anything records information about whether the cat is dead or alive, it immediately and randomly reverts back to being just one or the other: dead or alive. The act of looking, alters the state of reality.
This is just a thought-experiment to highlight the paradoxes within quantum mechanics, and how absurd it is to think of applying quantum mechanics to macroscopic objects like cats. But in a way this is precisely what scientists are trying to do by building a quantum computer. They are trying to create a machine where all potential solutions to a problem exist at once like how the cat is both dead and alive, but with potentially trillions of possibilities all layered up simultaneously rather than just two as in the cat example.
For me, I’m interested in using quantum computing to reveal this mind-bending layered reality and to highlight how fundamentally we live in a non-binary, queer universe, and all objects including ourselves are made from this weird material.
Libby Heaney: slimeQore, 2022. Among the Machines, Zabludowicz Collection, London. Courtesy the artist and Zabludowicz Collection. Photo by Richard Eaton
Wrapping your head around things existing in multiple states is quite the challenge. In slimeQrawl, your use of a quantum computer creates layered videos that seem to represent these multiple states, while also giving rise to something entirely new. While we were watching it in the club for the first time a slimy phallic object appeared from the layers which was actually the antennae of a snail. How do you feel about the unexpected outcomes of creating work in this way?
I love opening up meanings to the unexpected, the absurd, the ethereal or the numinous. In Umberto Eco’s book The Open Work, he linked quantum particles and their pluralities to the notion of an artwork holding many different meanings. Following Freya Jarman’s work Queer Voices, I take an expanded view of what queer means beyond sexual identity. Like the interplay of relations between layers in quantum physics, the process of queering is an open-ended practice of unsettling, (un)containing and negotiation that resists fixedness and remains malleable.
Interpretation too is malleable. It is always a process of becoming, dependent on an audience of individuals in flux and an ever changing environment. Indeterminacies, wildness, queerness, magic, ghosts, spiritualities, subjectivities and context are all important in different ways in quantum physics (even though scientists wouldn’t approve of how I’ve worded it). Perhaps slimeQrawl functions as a portal, opening up new dimensions of imagination through the quantum layering. Quantum science predicts that our universe is one branch of an infinite number in a giant layered multi-verse.
Maybe new creatures and ghosts of creatures, like the slimy phallus, emerge from within the multiple wilds, showing that so-called individual bodies (human, animal and inanimate) haunt and entangle with each other, shapeshifting into unfamiliar forms. Things and even nothing are never independent. They result from the layering of bodies and nobodies. Entanglement of bodies, machines and slime, blurs the existing and renders strange pulsating categories – monsters? – that may appear only for a moment before dissolving back into the collective, like the primordial soup or the universe at the point of the big bang.
Libby Heaney: slimeQore, 2022. Among the Machines, Zabludowicz Collection, London. Courtesy the artist and Zabludowicz Collection. Photo by Richard Eaton
I love this notion that things and even nothing are never independent, the merging of video in slimeQrawl really brings that to life. The work also features renders of real quantum computers, they are really intricate fascinating futuristic looking objects. What are your thoughts about the potential positive and negative future of quantum computers?
This is a big slippery question and so important. At the moment quantum computers are in the prototype phase, hyped up for investment purposes into a full blown quantum bubble. But when a full-scale QC eventually exists, in three to 30 years from now, their vast exponential processing power (those trillions of simultaneous possibilities that I mentioned earlier) will change everything.
Quantum computers will break all currently used encryption including the blockchains; they are excellent at simulating materials at a level of detail impossible with any type of digital computer, which will lead to new understandings of biological systems and life itself, but also new types of weapons.
Revolutionary new materials will be developed for instance based on the intricacies of photosynthesis that may help in the fight against climate change, but understanding life so closely also means our bodies, emotions and thoughts are even more vulnerable to seductive modes of control.
All of this will be positive or/and negative depending on who owns and uses the technology. If we aren’t careful it will likely be a big slimy tech company. There’s currently a race to be the first one to build a full-scale QC, giving a huge unparalleled advantage to whoever owns it. If you think the ethical debates around AI and machine learning are thin, then the ones around quantum technologies are practically non-existent. Given we’re right at the start of the quantum-age, there’s still time for people, including the critical art-world to sit up and take notice, before these technologies become embedded in our day-to-day systems and therefore very difficult to change.
You make some great video explainers about quantum on your Instagram and I would recommend everyone to go follow you and check them out. But if you had to recommend a book, article or talk that people could read to understand more what would it be?
I adore Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, which entangles quantum theory with a material realist philosophy to describe a post-human, performative Agential reality. Here is a quote from it: “The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the "Other." Also Barad’s essay On Touching: The Inhuman that Therefore I am is wonderful and thinks through response-ability through quantum touch. For something more scientific, perhaps something like Wired’s guide to Quantum Computing.
slimeQrawl by Libby Heaney, 2023
Finally, thanks so much for being our autumn moving image commission! Before you go, do you have any upcoming projects in the pipeline you’d like to share?
I’ll be launching Wild Data, a commission by Mozilla Foundation, later this year. It’s a playable experience set within a digital wilderness that asks: What if Digital Systems Could Be Wild Like Nature? You can hear more about Wild Data in this talk I did with the Serpentine Gallery earlier this year.
