Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground), 2025, realtime interactive quantum multiverse with live webcam feed (via Unity app) with stereo sound, variable time
Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground) is a realtime, interactive video work in which viewers encounter, and momentarily become part of, a layered, unstable multiverse. The work formed part of Heaney’s solo exhibition Shadowscapes: Heaney, JMW Turner and Quantum at Orleans House Gallery (9 October 2025 – 1 March 2026), presented within Tate’s Turner 250 programme.
The exhibition brought Heaney’s work into dialogue with three paintings by J. M. W. Turner, The Vision of Jacob’s Ladder (c.1830), The Hero of a Hundred Fights (c.1800–10, reworked 1847), and Rocky Bay with Figures (c.1827–30), selected in collaboration with Tate Britain curator Nicole Cochrane. Turner’s paintings are approached as atmospheric and psychological terrains, shaped by belief systems, technology and nature.
Drawing on Jung’s concept of the shadow, understood here as what remains unseen, disowned, or indirectly encountered, and on quantum physics, where systems exist as fields of potential rather than fixed states, Heaney constructs an environment in which emotional, psychological and material layers coexist without resolving.
Within the work, audiences encounter shifting ‘emotional landscapes’: black mountainous forms, thorny growths, barren moonlit terrains, turbulent rivers, degraded structures, caves, haze and unfamiliar organic life. These environments are layered over video of Heaney’s open mouth, lips parted, suggesting a space that is simultaneously interior and exterior, intimate and environmental, human and geological.
The layers continually shift in relation to one another according to Heaney’s custom-written quantum computing code, which draws on multi-qubit quantum entanglement from IBM’s publicly accessible quantum computers and is embedded within the Unity game engine. The resulting aesthetic is unstable, blurred and stratified, producing a non-linear experience in which no single perspective dominates.
The work actively responds to the presence of viewers. Using a live webcam and AI-based facial recognition, the system detects when someone enters the frame. At moments of close observation, movement slows, imagery partially freezes and the soundscape softens. A spoken narrative briefly emerges, echoing the quantum principle in which multiple possibilities collapse into a single state under observation. When the viewer steps away, the system resumes its fluid, multi-state behaviour.
Audience members also see faint traces of themselves embedded within the visual layers, emphasising how observation, entanglement and participation alter the state of the work. Looking is not neutral, it transforms the system.
Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground) was accompanied by a site-specific soft sculptural seat designed to encourage duration and attentiveness. The form resembles a hybrid of branches and tentacles, upholstered in brown-toned fabric referencing Turner’s palette and the architectural surfaces of the gallery. Silicone casts of Heaney’s hand with elongated black nails emerge from the structure, extending the interface between body, object and digital system.
Combined with an atmospheric, glitching and sometimes pulsating soundscape, the work creates a space in which emotional residues circulate without explanation or resolution. Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground) stages an encounter with projection, instability, and entanglement, inviting viewers to remain with the discomfort of a world in which inner and outer landscapes cannot be cleanly separated.
