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Libby Heaney X Jemma Foster
Libby Heaney is a visual artist, lecturer and quantum computer developer who holds a PhD in Quantum Information Science from the University of Leeds and an MA in Art and Science from Central Saint Martins in London. She is currently artist-in-residence at the Serpentine.
JF: As a quantum physicist, your work has a whole other level of complexity to it. How does this inform your process?
LH: I’m writing all my own code from scratch, I’m not using GAN or Stable Diffusion like other artists. I’m working with encoding languages like Python and IBM’s coding language for quantum computers. I’m using IBM’s quantum computer. They have some smaller ones that are publicly available that anyone can use, and then you can pay as you go for some larger ones, which is very expensive, actually.
So within that, what I do generally is run code on the quantum computer, which really looks so boring – it’s just lines of code, not like prompting in the way that AI currently is, and then I can generally get lists of data. On the surface, it’s just really, really boring spreadsheets.
JF: Have you attempted to play with superposition or entanglement in your artwork, in the sense that the observer effect of the user or player introduces a collapse that triggers some random action within the experience?
LH: My work isn’t live in that sense. I don’t have access to entanglement in an artwork, because when you work with, say, IBM’s quantum computers, you’re put into a queue. And sometimes it can take two days to get your data back. Large institutions, universities or companies pay millions of dollars for priority use. I think it’s something like one million a year for a university and ten times that for a commercial company.
I haven’t explored collapse in my work yet, because I’m more interested in what is the structure of a quantum world – like what are the layered realities that we can start to see traces of through quantum computing. My work is an interpretation of quantum physics to ask questions about reality that exists in a much higher dimensional space than three dimensions and time. How can you start visualising that? How does that allow us to see this reality in a way that’s more plural and fluid and connected?
Collapse is really interesting though and I did have a proposal for an immersive work that I wanted AI to detect when people were using their phones in the environment, and then see if that happened to collapse, but the technology is for now too glitchy to make this happen in a stable way.
In my work Ent- which plays with quantum superposition, or “the ability for one thing to be in two or more possibilities at the same time”, the world does collapse at random times. So it’s kind of like a simulated version of real quantum collapse. There is a real-time playable version on a games engine, with randomness programmed into it. You can go to the edge of the world, like some people like to fly through the world and see how far the world goes. Typically, men like to do this – they want to see if they can break the game. When you reach this sort of invisible boundary at the edge of the world, that collapses a world as well. It’s simulated – it’s not really using quantum collapse.
After some time, a problem collapses everything. You almost haven’t got enough time to do enough computation before everything falls apart. We would call this noise, which for an artist is quite interesting.
JF: Institutions investigating consciousness, such the Global Consciousness Project use random event generators (REGs) to demonstrate a sort of collapse, in a very analog way. These devices are programmed to spew out random numbers, but these numbers have been shown to behave unusually, perhaps even syntropically, when influenced by group intention, or when the collective experiences something like 9/11. Quantum mechanics is about as magical as science gets. Do you see quantum mechanics as a vehicle for understanding consciousness?
LH: Well, quantum is kind of both analog and digital at the same, this is the idea of wave-particle duality. It’s like waves are more analog, and then particles are fixed with boundaries and more digital in a way. Like the word quantum in Latin, means packets, it is packaged– so that's more digital. It kind of depends on how you look at the quantum system. You bring either the digital-ness or the analog-ness into being on your measurement apparatus into what you’re doing.
Scientists hate the conflation between consciousness and physics. I think I’ve had to unlearn the dogmatic nature of being a scientist – scientists really see Western science as the truth and other forms of knowledge are fake or are less-embodied knowledge, like intuition and spiritualism.I’ve unlearned a lot, and that took some time. It’s a different way of thinking because when you’ve been working as a scientist for 12 years, including my undergraduate degree, you kind of get indoctrinated. Now I see that we’re scientists who are currently using reductionist tools and reductionist methods to look at something that is not reductionist. And particularly if it includes subjective things, like consciousness, which is a subjective science, there isn’t one objective reality that can account for everything.
So I think one of the things with quantum computing is that they’re not fully developed yet, they’re actually really shit at quantum computing. When quantum computers are fully developed – maybe in 5, 10, 20, 30 years, depending on who you believe – then they will probably be able to look at reality and the nature of consciousness.
There are lots of technical caveats to this, because the whole discipline is really, really challenging. There is what’s theoretically possible and physically what’s actually allowed by the laws of physics. When quantum computers start to see the unknown unknowns or suggest the connectedness between things, like you are saying with the REG experiments, that previously we could never have detected because we didn't have the right tools to do that, then I think quantum computers will be like a paradigmatic shift, and we are alive to see what comes out of that.
JF: The potential for when quantum computing reaches that level is very exciting. I’m interested in nonlinear linguistics and interspecies communication and how large language models coupled with quantum processing, could dissolve the language barrier between us and other species.
LH: Yeah, there is so much to say about this. First of all, there’s already scientists using quantum computers as well as they can be used for linguistics – for natural language processing, like Bob Coecke in Oxford. The structure of quantum physics is very much like natural language processing, how meaning is derived. So if you take a sentence, meaning isn’t isolated in one word; the meaning is distributed across the whole sentence. So the words are almost like these fixed points, like symbols, but their meaning is something that’s more like a superposition or entanglement that floats and entangles different words together.
And it’s more like an emergent phenomenon as opposed to something that’s atomised. So I think this is just using quantum physics to look at linguistics, how it is in a very traditional sense – not using quantum ideas to think of it in a nonlinear or interspecies way. I don’t know anyone who’s done that yet.
JF: There are people like Project CETI using machine learning to understand the language of sperm whales and Alexander Ollongren, who created a language (LINCOS) based on logic to communicate with aliens.
LH: This sounds amazing. I’m really interested in language as well. I mean, you could definitely take linguistics into using quantum physics. As for extraterrestrial communication, we are missing some quantum theory. You’ve probably heard that one of the big challenges in contemporary science is to conflate relativity and quantum physics together, because they are incompatible. So relativistic stuff is like big fast stuff, and quantum physics is small cold stuff. So like inside black holes, you’d need a quantum theory of gravity, and no one knows how that would even work yet.
JF: As far as being a universal language, I think LINCOS falls short because it lacks the fluidity and spontaneity of nonverbal communication.
LH: I think it would be embodied as well. All information is physical, even though people talk about the immaterial digital realm. Everything is encoded on something. And I think that’s what Quantum Information Theory does.
Quantum Information theory is the theory of processing information or quantum computers, because there's quantum internet and other technologies away from just quantum computing, which are actually more successful than quantum computing. And what it does is it really shows a material basis for communication and language.
When it’s non-binary, it’s really strange. Maybe you should look at quantum communication actually, because there's a whole theory around this. Quantum communication is like how you can use entanglement, for instance, to do things like teleportation, which we think of as science fiction, but actually at the microscopic level, you can teleport and that can be used. I mean, it’s already being used. Professor Pan Jianwei has done some interesting work in quantum teleportation. That is interesting because it kind of bridges this space, it is the embodied nature of language and information, coded on light particles.
JF: Your work has a seeking quality, but it is also random and wild and playful. In Rewilding Data you take what you describe as the discarded data from the corners of the room to subvert bias and imposed structures, to allow for organic growth. Your use of slime is also a perfect expression of this and the nature of entanglement, the merging of things and interconnected being. What first enticed you to the morphology of slime in all its satisfying squelchy glory?
LH: Yeah, that’s the idea. Playing with slime, you become more quantum, you start spreading and feeling like a superposition at the same time. There is a playfulness to my practice, it’s almost like my process is slimy in itself or wild in itself because it kind of never settles, like the media I work with. I’m jumping and searching for something I know I can never reach because it’s really impossible to fully express quantum in the macroscopic world. I mean, the laws of physics say you can’t do that, sadly. I can’t change those, but maybe one day through digital technologies.
I love working with game engines because you can change physics in the game engines, but it’s still an approximation of a quantum world because of technical reasons. Trying to represent something so complex in the digital world just doesn’t work. And these mediums like glass and real slime and watercolour painting and sculptures are part of that seeking, I always say I’m kind of circling the void. I can never get there, but I can keep trying, and that’s what I think is responsible for this shape-shifting nature of what I’m doing and never settling.
JF: Do you see that there’s a sort of therapeutic quality to the experience in terms of how we experience our emotions as quantum – like the idea we’re not just in one place at one time, like we’re experiencing trauma at the same time, is inspired by the future and when you’re in that game, it can kind of just sort of fracture that rigidity of thinking?
LH: That’s actually something that I’m just starting to work on. I’ve been reading Gabor Matte and Bessel van der Kolk and exploring trauma as quantum from my own personal experience, and making work around that. And I think yes, emotions and quantum are highly connected.
It’s still something I’m thinking about, but you know, going back to ideas around interspecies communication, one of the things that I started thinking about last year in a work called Slime Qore, and that was really a performative lecture. I was wondering if we can touch our own inner speak, inner wildness or our own animality, if we can touch our slimy orifices and get used to the fact that we are animals. Because of our brain and Western thought and dualism, and capitalism and so on, we are detached from our (I hate using the word) true natures.
So if we can go in and become comfortable with our own monsters, that’s related to trauma as well, and the shadow self, then we should be more in tune with or able to entangle better with other people, which we know is true because if we know ourselves, we’re better at knowing others, but also other animals and nature and so on as well. So the idea is that I’m using myself as an embodied, slimy creature at the moment, I suppose, and thinking about and working through it.
My sister passed away in 2019 very suddenly. So I’m working through my own trauma – I mean obviously childhood trauma, developmental trauma, which we all have, I’m sure. The question is, how can you get in touch with your wildest emotions? The scary ones that we try and hide and not feel, and how does that then transform how I present myself? Because I’ve suffered from loads of anxieties and all sorts and addictions. So how can that change your entanglement with others?
JF: Working with slime as an embodied practice of entangling the different parts of ourselves and with others sounds intrinsically therapeutic, bringing us into a more fluid emotional state.
LH: Yeah, exactly. I guess slime on a very practical level as a visual metaphor, but then also a more dreamy world around quantum as well. I’m starting a big project next week working with Naomi Anand on thinking about this topic of entangling with ourselves. She’s a movement practitioner and yoga teacher, but we’re not doing yoga because it‘s not about the body, it’s more about breathing – a meditation, I suppose, to see how we can go in and go out as well. Entangling our internal and external roles.
And a few years ago during lockdown, I was practising a lot of continuum movement – it’s using sound and breath work to return our bodies to the oceanic origins. So essentially become slimy, become wave-like. And it's actually one of the most powerful practices I’ve ever done. You start to feel your body moving in this undulating way almost spontaneously, and you become light and it’s very strange. It can leave you feeling really euphoric and high actually.
SLIME RITUAL
Find your kin in hand
Massage its slime and stretch it out in space and time
Take its belly in your palm and caress it over your heart
Coherent neighbour touch, and an oozing rhythmic breathing.
Image: A Glorious Non-Linear Computation by Libby Heaney → @libby_heaney_
Libby Heaney X Jemma Foster
Libby Heaney is a visual artist, lecturer and quantum computer developer who holds a PhD in Quantum Information Science from the University of Leeds and an MA in Art and Science from Central Saint Martins in London. She is currently artist-in-residence at the Serpentine.
JF: As a quantum physicist, your work has a whole other level of complexity to it. How does this inform your process?
LH: I’m writing all my own code from scratch, I’m not using GAN or Stable Diffusion like other artists. I’m working with encoding languages like Python and IBM’s coding language for quantum computers. I’m using IBM’s quantum computer. They have some smaller ones that are publicly available that anyone can use, and then you can pay as you go for some larger ones, which is very expensive, actually.
So within that, what I do generally is run code on the quantum computer, which really looks so boring – it’s just lines of code, not like prompting in the way that AI currently is, and then I can generally get lists of data. On the surface, it’s just really, really boring spreadsheets.
JF: Have you attempted to play with superposition or entanglement in your artwork, in the sense that the observer effect of the user or player introduces a collapse that triggers some random action within the experience?
LH: My work isn’t live in that sense. I don’t have access to entanglement in an artwork, because when you work with, say, IBM’s quantum computers, you’re put into a queue. And sometimes it can take two days to get your data back. Large institutions, universities or companies pay millions of dollars for priority use. I think it’s something like one million a year for a university and ten times that for a commercial company.
I haven’t explored collapse in my work yet, because I’m more interested in what is the structure of a quantum world – like what are the layered realities that we can start to see traces of through quantum computing. My work is an interpretation of quantum physics to ask questions about reality that exists in a much higher dimensional space than three dimensions and time. How can you start visualising that? How does that allow us to see this reality in a way that’s more plural and fluid and connected?
Collapse is really interesting though and I did have a proposal for an immersive work that I wanted AI to detect when people were using their phones in the environment, and then see if that happened to collapse, but the technology is for now too glitchy to make this happen in a stable way.
In my work Ent- which plays with quantum superposition, or “the ability for one thing to be in two or more possibilities at the same time”, the world does collapse at random times. So it’s kind of like a simulated version of real quantum collapse. There is a real-time playable version on a games engine, with randomness programmed into it. You can go to the edge of the world, like some people like to fly through the world and see how far the world goes. Typically, men like to do this – they want to see if they can break the game. When you reach this sort of invisible boundary at the edge of the world, that collapses a world as well. It’s simulated – it’s not really using quantum collapse.
After some time, a problem collapses everything. You almost haven’t got enough time to do enough computation before everything falls apart. We would call this noise, which for an artist is quite interesting.
JF: Institutions investigating consciousness, such the Global Consciousness Project use random event generators (REGs) to demonstrate a sort of collapse, in a very analog way. These devices are programmed to spew out random numbers, but these numbers have been shown to behave unusually, perhaps even syntropically, when influenced by group intention, or when the collective experiences something like 9/11. Quantum mechanics is about as magical as science gets. Do you see quantum mechanics as a vehicle for understanding consciousness?
LH: Well, quantum is kind of both analog and digital at the same, this is the idea of wave-particle duality. It’s like waves are more analog, and then particles are fixed with boundaries and more digital in a way. Like the word quantum in Latin, means packets, it is packaged– so that's more digital. It kind of depends on how you look at the quantum system. You bring either the digital-ness or the analog-ness into being on your measurement apparatus into what you’re doing.
Scientists hate the conflation between consciousness and physics. I think I’ve had to unlearn the dogmatic nature of being a scientist – scientists really see Western science as the truth and other forms of knowledge are fake or are less-embodied knowledge, like intuition and spiritualism.I’ve unlearned a lot, and that took some time. It’s a different way of thinking because when you’ve been working as a scientist for 12 years, including my undergraduate degree, you kind of get indoctrinated. Now I see that we’re scientists who are currently using reductionist tools and reductionist methods to look at something that is not reductionist. And particularly if it includes subjective things, like consciousness, which is a subjective science, there isn’t one objective reality that can account for everything.
So I think one of the things with quantum computing is that they’re not fully developed yet, they’re actually really shit at quantum computing. When quantum computers are fully developed – maybe in 5, 10, 20, 30 years, depending on who you believe – then they will probably be able to look at reality and the nature of consciousness.
There are lots of technical caveats to this, because the whole discipline is really, really challenging. There is what’s theoretically possible and physically what’s actually allowed by the laws of physics. When quantum computers start to see the unknown unknowns or suggest the connectedness between things, like you are saying with the REG experiments, that previously we could never have detected because we didn't have the right tools to do that, then I think quantum computers will be like a paradigmatic shift, and we are alive to see what comes out of that.
JF: The potential for when quantum computing reaches that level is very exciting. I’m interested in nonlinear linguistics and interspecies communication and how large language models coupled with quantum processing, could dissolve the language barrier between us and other species.
LH: Yeah, there is so much to say about this. First of all, there’s already scientists using quantum computers as well as they can be used for linguistics – for natural language processing, like Bob Coecke in Oxford. The structure of quantum physics is very much like natural language processing, how meaning is derived. So if you take a sentence, meaning isn’t isolated in one word; the meaning is distributed across the whole sentence. So the words are almost like these fixed points, like symbols, but their meaning is something that’s more like a superposition or entanglement that floats and entangles different words together.
And it’s more like an emergent phenomenon as opposed to something that’s atomised. So I think this is just using quantum physics to look at linguistics, how it is in a very traditional sense – not using quantum ideas to think of it in a nonlinear or interspecies way. I don’t know anyone who’s done that yet.
JF: There are people like Project CETI using machine learning to understand the language of sperm whales and Alexander Ollongren, who created a language (LINCOS) based on logic to communicate with aliens.
LH: This sounds amazing. I’m really interested in language as well. I mean, you could definitely take linguistics into using quantum physics. As for extraterrestrial communication, we are missing some quantum theory. You’ve probably heard that one of the big challenges in contemporary science is to conflate relativity and quantum physics together, because they are incompatible. So relativistic stuff is like big fast stuff, and quantum physics is small cold stuff. So like inside black holes, you’d need a quantum theory of gravity, and no one knows how that would even work yet.
JF: As far as being a universal language, I think LINCOS falls short because it lacks the fluidity and spontaneity of nonverbal communication.
LH: I think it would be embodied as well. All information is physical, even though people talk about the immaterial digital realm. Everything is encoded on something. And I think that’s what Quantum Information Theory does.
Quantum Information theory is the theory of processing information or quantum computers, because there's quantum internet and other technologies away from just quantum computing, which are actually more successful than quantum computing. And what it does is it really shows a material basis for communication and language.
When it’s non-binary, it’s really strange. Maybe you should look at quantum communication actually, because there's a whole theory around this. Quantum communication is like how you can use entanglement, for instance, to do things like teleportation, which we think of as science fiction, but actually at the microscopic level, you can teleport and that can be used. I mean, it’s already being used. Professor Pan Jianwei has done some interesting work in quantum teleportation. That is interesting because it kind of bridges this space, it is the embodied nature of language and information, coded on light particles.
JF: Your work has a seeking quality, but it is also random and wild and playful. In Rewilding Data you take what you describe as the discarded data from the corners of the room to subvert bias and imposed structures, to allow for organic growth. Your use of slime is also a perfect expression of this and the nature of entanglement, the merging of things and interconnected being. What first enticed you to the morphology of slime in all its satisfying squelchy glory?
LH: Yeah, that’s the idea. Playing with slime, you become more quantum, you start spreading and feeling like a superposition at the same time. There is a playfulness to my practice, it’s almost like my process is slimy in itself or wild in itself because it kind of never settles, like the media I work with. I’m jumping and searching for something I know I can never reach because it’s really impossible to fully express quantum in the macroscopic world. I mean, the laws of physics say you can’t do that, sadly. I can’t change those, but maybe one day through digital technologies.
I love working with game engines because you can change physics in the game engines, but it’s still an approximation of a quantum world because of technical reasons. Trying to represent something so complex in the digital world just doesn’t work. And these mediums like glass and real slime and watercolour painting and sculptures are part of that seeking, I always say I’m kind of circling the void. I can never get there, but I can keep trying, and that’s what I think is responsible for this shape-shifting nature of what I’m doing and never settling.
JF: Do you see that there’s a sort of therapeutic quality to the experience in terms of how we experience our emotions as quantum – like the idea we’re not just in one place at one time, like we’re experiencing trauma at the same time, is inspired by the future and when you’re in that game, it can kind of just sort of fracture that rigidity of thinking?
LH: That’s actually something that I’m just starting to work on. I’ve been reading Gabor Matte and Bessel van der Kolk and exploring trauma as quantum from my own personal experience, and making work around that. And I think yes, emotions and quantum are highly connected.
It’s still something I’m thinking about, but you know, going back to ideas around interspecies communication, one of the things that I started thinking about last year in a work called Slime Qore, and that was really a performative lecture. I was wondering if we can touch our own inner speak, inner wildness or our own animality, if we can touch our slimy orifices and get used to the fact that we are animals. Because of our brain and Western thought and dualism, and capitalism and so on, we are detached from our (I hate using the word) true natures.
So if we can go in and become comfortable with our own monsters, that’s related to trauma as well, and the shadow self, then we should be more in tune with or able to entangle better with other people, which we know is true because if we know ourselves, we’re better at knowing others, but also other animals and nature and so on as well. So the idea is that I’m using myself as an embodied, slimy creature at the moment, I suppose, and thinking about and working through it.
My sister passed away in 2019 very suddenly. So I’m working through my own trauma – I mean obviously childhood trauma, developmental trauma, which we all have, I’m sure. The question is, how can you get in touch with your wildest emotions? The scary ones that we try and hide and not feel, and how does that then transform how I present myself? Because I’ve suffered from loads of anxieties and all sorts and addictions. So how can that change your entanglement with others?
JF: Working with slime as an embodied practice of entangling the different parts of ourselves and with others sounds intrinsically therapeutic, bringing us into a more fluid emotional state.
LH: Yeah, exactly. I guess slime on a very practical level as a visual metaphor, but then also a more dreamy world around quantum as well. I’m starting a big project next week working with Naomi Anand on thinking about this topic of entangling with ourselves. She’s a movement practitioner and yoga teacher, but we’re not doing yoga because it‘s not about the body, it’s more about breathing – a meditation, I suppose, to see how we can go in and go out as well. Entangling our internal and external roles.
And a few years ago during lockdown, I was practising a lot of continuum movement – it’s using sound and breath work to return our bodies to the oceanic origins. So essentially become slimy, become wave-like. And it's actually one of the most powerful practices I’ve ever done. You start to feel your body moving in this undulating way almost spontaneously, and you become light and it’s very strange. It can leave you feeling really euphoric and high actually.
SLIME RITUAL
Find your kin in hand
Massage its slime and stretch it out in space and time
Take its belly in your palm and caress it over your heart
Coherent neighbour touch, and an oozing rhythmic breathing.
Image: A Glorious Non-Linear Computation by Libby Heaney → @libby_heaney_