Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within), 2025, generative, interactive four channel sound installation with quantum computing, infinite time
Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) is a generative, interactive four channel sound installation, exploring Heaney’s inner world through Jung’s concept of ‘shadow’ and quantum physics.
Shadow work is important as when we do not recognise our disowned parts we often project them onto others and nature causing polarisation.
Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) is an ever-evolving, self-playing instrument. The resulting soundscape is an infinite-mix, it will never be the same twice. This continues Heaney’s explorations of the quantum notion of self as layered, unboundaried and deeply entangled with others.
Heaney wrote her own computer code to create various synthesized sounds from – and to process pre-recorded samples based on – data from digital images and various types of multi-qubit quantum entanglement (from IBM’s publicly available quantum computers). Here, quantum computing ‘expands’ the flat images into shapeshifting extra-dimensions, revealing hidden possibilities and orchestrating the spatial elements of the sound.
While the instrument works for any digital image and set of samples, in Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within), Heaney explores three paintings by JMW Turner, which are also part of her wider exhibition at Orleans House Gallery, London. The three paintings are The Vision of Jacob’s Ladder (?) (c.1830), The Hero of a Hundred Fights (1800-10, reworked 1847) and Rocky Bay with Figures (1827-30), which informed reflections on belief systems, technology and nature in relation to shadow respectively.
Jung spoke of how it’s not possible to see one’s own shadow directly. Rather, we glimpse it through dreams, visions, projections, how we treat others or by asking close friends.
For Heaney, the JMW Turner paintings were portals to access various aspects of her shadowside indirectly through free associations with the imagery via automatic writing, drawing, painting, movement, sound and AI.
When experiencing the work audiences hear tones, melodies, folly-like beats, strange voices and cries, blending human, nature and machine.
These might be processed samples of Heaney and her friends discussing her shadow in relation to the Turner paintings, various polyrhythms tapped out in a trance, AI generated clips and sounds synthesized by quantum computing. Through the strange patterning of the audio, audience members are swept on an emotional journey mediated through advanced technology.
All of these are triggered, sequenced and pitched automatically via the code, shifting between speakers following the unusual wavelike patterns of quantum entanglement, encouraging close listening.
Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) is interactive via a touchscreen. Viewers can see a copy of Heaney’s hand – like the needle of a record player – moving pixel by pixel over the digital image, indicating the part of the image that is currently playing. When viewers touch the screen, the hand moves to a new location. Audience members can then listen to this part of the image as the living soundscape recomposes itself.
Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) was accompanied by two site specific soft-sculptural seats encouraging audience members to linger and listen. The seats are camouflaged hybrids. They resemble branches or tentacles and the fabric is printed with modified digital images of the gallery floor. A grey silicone cast of Heaney’s hand with long black nails protrudes from one of the branches.
Overall, Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) invites audiences to make contact with their hidden emotions and to reflect on the parts of themselves they subconsciously avoid. How might the ‘wildness’ of the shadowscape – a living portrait of Heaney’s inner psyche – encourage listeners to also see themselves as part of nature rather than separate to it?