QX Product Launch Video, (2022), 4k video with sound, 4:29 mins.
QX Extended Advertisement, (2022), video no sound, 5:57 mins.
The Evolution of Ent-: QX is a two channel video installation expanding on Heaney’s immersive experience Ent-, a quantum revisiting of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490–1510).
In The Evolution of Ent-: QX, Libby Heaney imagines QX, “Quantum eXperience”, a quantum computing company that parodies the hyperbolic language, commercial aesthetics, and unquenchable greed of Big Tech.
Through the sometimes comical appropriation of corporate techniques, Heaney both criticizes the profit and power oriented objectives of big tech companies and suggests new avenues of exploration for quantum technology in art.
Lying beneath the corporate veneer are quantum glitches and slimy eruptions inviting viewers to consider the fluidity that underpins quantum computing as a way to move away from the binary and capitalist to a plural, shape-shifting landscape of deep interconnections.
In whatever way the quantum field is explored and extrapolated in The Evolution of Ent-: QX, for Heaney the importance lies within subverting “ the endless categorizations and control of humans and non-humans alike” to suggest real-world, tangible new pursuits that resist the alienation caused by the pursuit of never-ending profits.
The Evolution of Ent-: QX was exhibited and commissioned by arebyte gallery, London, 2022 and exhibited at re:publica festival, Berlin 2022, Fiumano Clase, London 2022, and HeK, Basel, 2023.