Libby Heaney is a visual artist with a PhD in quantum physics, whose moving image works, performances and participatory experiences explore the impacts of emerging technologies such as quantum computing and machine learning.
After 8 years as a lecturer and researcher at institutions such as University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore, Heaney became disillusioned by the lack of critical discourses within physics. She retrained as an artist not only to investigate the power structures of technology from wider viewpoints, but to also propose alternative, queer realities subverting the predominent uses of these tools.
Now, Heaney uses noise, nonsense, surrealism and affect to create new expressions of collective identity and belonging with each other and the world—a shape-shifting posthuman spirituality.
Heaney's work uses diverse media and modes like blurring, combining, remixing, weaving (derived from quantum physics) to unsettle or 'diffract' standard conceptions of 'truth.' From these foggy modes emerge strange new forms that question the distinction between fake and real, visible and invisible, private and public, the individual and the collective, especially where those categories are mediated by technology.
She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including at the V&A, ICA & Tate Modern in London, Sonar and CCCB in Barcelona as well as Ars Electronica in Linz.
