Libby Heaney is a British artist and quantum physicist who has been among the first artists to incorporate quantum computing directly into her practice, using IBM's public quantum computers since 2019 to develop a medium of her own.,,She combines moving image, glass, watercolour, virtual reality and public sculpture with quantum computing and AI to explore hybrid, non-binary and entangled ways of understanding identity and reality.,
Heaney worked as a physicist for about twelve years,earning a PhD in quantum information science at the University of Leedsand working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore, before retraining as an artist and completing an MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, London, graduating in 2015.,She has taught on the Information Experience Design programme at the Royal College of Art since 2014, becoming permanent faculty in 2016.Her first quantum work, Cephalopod Aliens (2019), used IBM's cloud-based quantum computing systems to suggest alternatives to the constraints of physical embodiment.
Ent- (2022), commissioned by Light Art Space and first shown at the Schering Stiftung in Berlin, is a 360-degree immersive installation that reanimates her scanned watercolour paintings, using her own quantum code, into a hybrid retelling of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.The work won a Lumen Prize in 2022,and its follow-up, The Evolution of Ent-: QX, shown at arebyte Gallery in London the same year, invents a fictional quantum-computing company that parodies the language of Big Tech to critique surveillance capitalism and the exploitation of immersive spectacle.Venuses (quantum bodies watched by Open Pose algorithm) (2021), shown in the Feral File exhibition “Reflections in the Water”, applies quantum data to a computer-vision algorithm to challenge the standardisation of nude poses established by painters such as Titian.,
Q is for Climate (?) (2023) layers quantum computing with climate data, and was shown in Nxt Museum's “Lilypads” programme and on a media wall at Gwangju Songjeong Station in 2024.,In 2024 Ent- (non-earthly delights), a 3-by-3-metre sculpture with two augmented-reality experiences developed with Gabriel Stones, was presented as part of Frieze Sculpture in London.Her work has since appeared in the group exhibitions “Hypercreatures—Future Mythologies” at the Max Ernst Museum and “Patterns of Entanglement” at NEORT++ in Tokyo, both in 2025, and in “Les Illusions Retrouvées”, part of the Némo biennale of digital arts at CentQuatre in Paris.,,,
