The first chapter of Heaney’s Ent- artwork is featured as part of ZKM’s BioMedia exhibition.
Commissioned by LAS, Heaney has been experimenting with quantum computing for a number of years. She is the only artist in the world using quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium and Ent- will be a 360-degree interactive installation taking quantum computing as both medium and subject matter. No fully fledged quantum computer is yet in existence but the technology has the potential to achieve results and speeds impossible with current computing. Ent- will explore the transformative changes quantum computing is expected to wreak on the future of everyday life.
Ent- is a quantum interpretation of the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490–1510). Visitors will enter a black cube in which a 360-degree projection takes them through the layers of Bosch’s painting – sky, buildings and landscapes, and water. Heaney has used quantum code to manipulate and animate her own watercolour paintings, creating hybrid creatures inspired by Bosch’s medieval monsters, landscapes that seem to shift and breathe, and exploding structures that float and re-form. Heaney chose to work with watercolour in particular because the bleeding of colours into one another reflects the merging and blurring of the quantum world.
“The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe is a unique cultural institution worldwide, because it is a place that expands the original tasks of the museum.”
“It is a house of all media and genres, a house of both spatial arts such as painting, photography and sculpture and time-based arts such as film, video, media art, music, dance, theater and performance. ZKM was founded in 1989 with the mission of continuing the classical arts into the digital age. This is why it is sometimes called the »electronic or digital Bauhaus« – an expression that is traced back to the founding director Heinrich Klotz.”