Talk
Sensing the Multiverses: Exploring the Magic of Quantum and Prehistoric Cave Paintings
Expand your imagination and blur the boundaries of art and science with UK artist Libby Heaney, whose practice explores ideas of quantum physics into art.
24.07.2025
In the workshop, participants will learn the key terms and meanings of quantum. This part of the session will discuss the radical potential of quantum concepts and the potentials and pitfalls of quantum technologies. The artist will show the participants how they can start experimenting with quantum computing.
In the evening, the program continues with a screening of "Q is for Climate (?)" (2023), a short film speculating on how the future quantum computers will impact climate change. The film is partly based on interviews with scientists at leading tech companies. The film shows human and non-human perspectives, including generative video and sound developed through quantum computing.
The Artist Talk will present the artist to share insights of her artistic practice and creative process. She will also reflect on her recent research trip to South Sulawesi — home to the world’s oldest cave paintings — and what it means to go beyond visual representations.
Supported by
Enabling Partner
About the Artist
Dr. Libby Heaney is a working class, award winning artist with a PhD and professional background in Quantum Science. She is the first artist to work with quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium.
Heaney’s practice explores the inherently non-binary and hybrid concepts and non-linear temporalities of quantum physics. She combines diverse media such as virtual reality, video games, moving image, watercolour, glass and most recently public sculpture with cutting-edge technologies like AI and quantum computing.
Together these create a dream-like aesthetic, asking big philosophical questions about existence & the nature of reality while remaining very human, intimate and embodied. Quantum inspired monsters, hybrids, slime and other fluid forms are recurring motifs, entangling personal narratives and emotional landscapes with the impact of the exterior realm.
Spanning the organic, the mechanical and the human, Heaney’s practice continuously seeks to expand the possibilities of the individual and the collective through the irrational magic of quantum, while critically queering capitalist uses of technology.
