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.
Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) is an ever-evolving, self-playing instrument. The resulting soundscape is an infinite-mix, it will never be quite the same twice.
Heaney wrote her own computer code to create various synthesized sounds and processes pre-recorded samples based on data from digital images and various types of multi-qubit quantum entanglement (from IBM’s publicly available quantum computers). The quantum computing ‘expands’ the flat images into shapeshifting extra-dimensions, revealing their hidden realities and orchestrating the spatial elements of the sound.
While the instrument can be adapted for any digital images and samples, in Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within), Heaney explores three paintings by JMW Turner, which are also part of the 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 shadow directly, rather we see it through dreams, visions, projections, how we treat others or by asking close friends.
Heaney therefore used the paintings by Turner as portals to access various aspects of her shadowside indirectly, asking how the imagery triggered associations through automatic writing, drawing, painting, movement, sound and AI.
Shadow work is important as when we do not recognise and own our supressed, unwanted parts we often project them onto others and nature.
When experiencing the work audiences hear strange voices and cries – often processed samples of Heaney and her friends discussing her shadow in relation to the Turner paintings – uncomfortable synthesized sounds, various polyrhythms tapped out in a trance, AI generated clips blending human with nature and more. All of these triggered, sequenced and pitched via the code, shift between speakers following the unusual wavelike patterns of quantum entanglement, encouraging close listening.
Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) is interactive via a touchscreen where viewers can see a copy of Heaney’s – like the needle of a record player – moving pixel by pixel over the digital image. When viewers touch the screen, the hand moves and they can listen to this part of the image as the living soundscape recomposes itself for this new environment.
Overall Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) invites audiences to think of themselves as part of nature rather than separate to it.
THIS WEBPAGE IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION