There is a great deal of art about quantum computing, and most of it is illustration — particle imagery, probability clouds, the word “entanglement” doing metaphorical labor. Libby Heaney’s work is the rare case where the physics is load-bearing.
Heaney holds a PhD in quantum information science and worked as a physicist before turning to art. She describes herself as “probably the first artist to work with quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium” — not as subject matter, but as the thing the work runs on.
Her Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) (2025) is currently on view in “A Glimpse of the Infinite,” the inaugural Shenzhen Art and Technology Biennale, through April 30, 2027.
Medium, not metaphor
The distinction Heaney draws is sharp. “I’m interested in using quantum technology to create a new aesthetics based on the materiality of the quantum world” — the claim being that quantum computation has properties that produce forms digital computation cannot, and that those forms are worth pursuing for aesthetic rather than illustrative reasons.
She’s also clear that quantum is “an ontologically different class of computing, not simply more of the same,” while refusing the purism that usually accompanies such a claim: “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.” The quantum processor does its work in superposition; what reaches the viewer is, inevitably, a measurement — collapsed, classical, and rendered on ordinary hardware.
Her most provocative position concerns reproduction. “We need to get rid of the word ‘representation’ because in quantum physics you can’t copy.” That’s the no-cloning theorem — a quantum state cannot be duplicated — taken as an aesthetic principle rather than a technical footnote. For a field built substantially on infinitely reproducible files, an artist working in a medium where copying is physically forbidden is a genuinely strange and interesting position to occupy.
The work
Heaney’s practice spans digital video, sculpture, watercolor, AR, and sound installation, and it’s consistently less clinical than the subject matter suggests.
- Heartbreak and Magic (2024) — a VR installation made in grief after her sister’s death, using quantum patterning to build a nonlinear experience of time. Superposition as a structure for memory rather than a physics demonstration.
- Qlimate Tongues (2024) — an eight-channel sound installation drawing on quantum non-hierarchy.
- Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) (2025) — currently in Shenzhen.
She has described upcoming work involving glass — glass snake body parts, “flaccid glass tentacles” — and an interest in pushing further into quantum teleportation. The pairing of a hand-blown, obstinately physical material with the least tangible technology available is characteristic. So is her stated aim of “critically queering capitalist uses of technology”: the quantum computing industry is being built almost entirely around optimization, logistics, cryptography, and finance, and Heaney is one of very few people using the hardware for anything else.
She’s also been commissioned to make a site-specific installation for the Sainsbury Centre’s season asking “What is the Meaning of Life?”, and showed a solo exhibition at Orleans House Gallery responding to J.M.W. Turner’s paintings — a pairing that makes more sense than it first appears, Turner having spent his career on atmospheric conditions that resist being pinned to a fixed state.
Quotations are from Heaney’s interview with Alex Estorick for Right Click Save.