Beyond Binary Thinking: Libby Heaney’s Quantum Art

Quantum computing is usually described through what it may one day do: solve previously impossible problems, transform industries and process information at extraordinary scale. Libby Heaney asks a more imaginative and more urgent question. What might quantum computing do to the way we understand ourselves and the world around us?

Heaney is unusually equipped to explore that territory. An artist with a PhD and professional research background in quantum information science, she has worked with quantum computing as an artistic medium since 2019. Her practice brings self-written quantum code into contact with watercolour, sculpture, augmented reality, game engines and moving image.

For Frieze Sculpture 2024, that approach took physical form in Ent- (non-earthly delights), a large-scale sculpture and augmented-reality experience in The Regent's Park. The work did not present quantum computing as an invisible engine hidden behind an interface. Instead, it made quantum strangeness bodily, fluid and public.

A creature without a fixed identity

Ent- (non-earthly delights) appeared as a three-metre hybrid creature moving low across the grass: part body, part landscape and part machine. Heaney has described the figure as a quantum cyborg, or "Q-borg". It resisted the stable identity we expect from figurative sculpture.

That instability is central to her practice. Heaney works against fixed representation, combining multiple references and viewpoints so that a body never resolves into one familiar category. The sculpture's headless form, tentacular details and shifting digital layers presented hybridity not as an exception but as a condition.

Visitors could scan QR codes to activate two augmented-reality experiences. Through their phones, the solid sculpture became fluid: forms shifted, structures dispersed and reassembled, and painted creatures moved around it. The physical object was only one state of the work.

Quantum computing as an artistic medium

The digital imagery was not simply designed to look futuristic. Heaney used her own quantum computing code to manipulate and animate watercolour paintings. Her process draws on principles such as superposition and entanglement, where quantum information does not behave according to the fixed either-or logic of classical computing.

For Heaney, that non-binary structure has cultural as well as scientific significance. She argues that quantum logic can unsettle the classical, Newtonian model of a world made from separate, stable objects. In her work, boundaries blur between human and machine, physical and virtual, individual and environment.

Watercolour is especially important to this language. Pigments bleed, merge and interfere on wet paper, producing an image whose edges cannot be fully controlled. Heaney uses that material behaviour as an analogue for quantum phenomena, then processes and animates the paintings through quantum systems.

The result is not a visual explanation of quantum physics. Heaney has said that these animations are traces of what a quantum world might look like if it could be seen. Art gives her permission to make its strangeness experiential rather than reducing it to a diagram.

Returning to Bosch through AR

The Ent- project develops a sustained conversation with Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. Bosch's triptych moves through paradise, earthly desire and punishment in a crowded field of hybrid bodies and impossible structures. Its imagery feels historical and startlingly contemporary at once.

Heaney draws on Bosch's monsters and landscapes without recreating the painting. Her watercolour creatures stretch, breathe and combine inside a computational environment. Augmented reality allows those forms to inhabit the park while remaining unstable and multiple.

The reference also gives the project its moral complexity. Bosch's painting can be read as both an ecstatic celebration of imagination and a warning about desire. Heaney finds a similar contradiction in quantum technology.

Neither technological optimism nor rejection

Heaney's stance is compelling because it avoids two easy positions. She does not treat quantum computing as an inevitable solution to human problems, but she does not dismiss it as a purely threatening technology either.

Quantum computing promises forms of processing that may eventually exceed the capabilities of today's machines. Its underlying principles offer new metaphors for connectedness, multiplicity and identities that cannot be reduced to binary categories.

At the same time, those capabilities could deepen existing systems of power. Heaney points toward the risks of surveillance capitalism and the possibility that sufficiently powerful quantum computers could disrupt encryption methods used to protect private information. A technology that opens new imaginative worlds may also create new methods of extraction and control.

Ent- holds these possibilities together. Its hybrids are playful and unsettling. Its AR invites discovery through the same networked device that records, distracts and monetises attention. Visitors become entangled with the work, but that entanglement is not presented as innocent.

The phone as part of the subject

Using a QR code to unlock an artwork is now familiar. In Ent-, however, the phone is more than a convenient delivery system.

Heaney connects the visitors' bodily relationship with their devices to Bosch's treatment of temptation. Where Bosch filled his central panel with bodies drawn into strange pleasures, the contemporary audience approaches Heaney's sculpture through an addictive networked object already held in the hand.

This makes the augmented layer self-aware. The work uses the phone to reveal a transformed sculpture while asking what it means to experience the world through that device. The interface is simultaneously a portal and a constraint.

For artists and creative technologists, this is a valuable principle. A technology should not be selected only for what it can display. Its habits, politics and effect on the body can become part of the content.

Why Heaney’s work matters

Much of the public language around emerging technology focuses on efficiency. Heaney instead uses quantum systems to make experience less fixed, less predictable and less easily classified. She brings scientific knowledge into art without turning the artwork into a demonstration.

Her practice also shows the value of genuine interdisciplinary depth. The code, paintings, sculpture and augmented reality are not separate production layers. Each medium tests the others. Quantum theory informs the imagery; watercolour gives quantum behaviour a material metaphor; sculpture gives it public scale; AR prevents the object from settling into one form.

At Diffused, we are drawn to work that treats technology with this level of creative and critical intent. The future of creative technology will not be defined by access to tools alone, but by artists who can expose the assumptions within them and imagine different ways of relating through them.

Ent- (non-earthly delights) does not tell us whether a quantum future will be paradise or catastrophe. Like Bosch's garden, it places attraction and warning in the same landscape—and asks us to recognise that we are already entangled in its making.