Written for "Ent" by Libby Heaney at Schering Stiftung, Berlin, commissioned by LAS 2022

Inhabiting Ent
The scene opens with a luscious emerald landscape, bursting with life forms and other organic matter thirsty for the sun’s rays. Encased within speckled clouds, the baby blue sky is feverish in its anticipation of discovery, and the sun dappling through appears as an orb of pure white light.

Ent-er. Ent-er. Ent-er. She’s whispering to you.

Gliding over a pool of crystal water you accelerate at the approach of the first sculptural monolith. Dazzlingly blue and resembling a Sepultura of histories past, it stands tall with ribbon-like appendages topping its bulbous mound. As you near closer, floating, an oculus at its base pulls you in. Time slows down; something in the air changes.

The space around you darkens and thickens and at the centre of the abyss, a creature emerges from the abstracted darkness, glowing now with a lattice of light pathways and rhizomatic, fluorescent pastel tentacles. The creature is fluid, its colour and shape ever-changing. Transfixing and transformative, turning into motes of multi-coloured light and whirling into a frenzy, forcing you out of the cocoon you're in.

Ent-anglements. Ent-ropy. Ent-er.
Ent-wining.
Ent-hralling.
Ent-icing.

Now in the water, you watch as more architectural monoliths spin on their axes, glitching in and out of focus. Dynamic, they bounce with animated abandon, vibrating in a state of constant agitation and an impulse to move. Shimmering with potential, the landscape opens up to you and becomes a nest of cable-like blue lights, tangled amidst the green and pleasant land you were once a part of. Powder blue turns cobalt, turns Aegean blue, turns to dusk, fades to black.

Bosch’s Garden
Libby Heaney’s Ent- is a foray into unknown unknowns, a trip of sorts, down a meta-memory lane, carving out a future that might already exist beneath the surface of what is perceptible. Inspired by the central panel of the Hieronymous Bosch triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, Ent- is a quantum interpretation and exploration of the parallels between Bosch’s Garden and the potential futures of quantum computing centred around belief, sin, desire and categorisation. In Bosch’s work, we see a celebration of human behaviour; bodies pulsate with the possibility of being, winding themselves around the uncanny, untethered and untold.

As a single narrative, Bosch’s painting shows a hellish fate for humanity consumed by passion and pleasure. Whereas for Ent-, the inevitable end dictates a path of entanglement, of shapeshifting reality, and through queering a sense of stability. With desire at the heart of both works, viewers must tread carefully.

From Classics to Quantum
Using quantum theories of entanglement, superposition and interference, the work disbands the structural binaries of classical computing1 and incorporates a quantum understanding of states of being2instead. For example, a classical bit is either on or off, but a quantum bit can be on and off at the same time, a condition known as superposition. If in a superposition, the particles can be in any or both states at once, only when they are observed do they fall into one state or another. Made to solve problems that are unsolvable by traditional methods, the quantum computer calculates in a new way, one that uses a non-binary system as its primary function. This methodology can be applied metaphorically to Ent-: Ent- makes visible non-binary reflections on an intrinsically non-binary world. By generously allowing the evolution of forms, matter, pattern, object, and materiality, the figures in Bosch’s painting are transfigured into what they could have been, stretched, re-interpreted and made anew.

Unlike Bosch’s triptych, where “reading” the work from left to right forms an essential part of the understanding of the work, Libby’s world unfolds non-linearly and is affected by observation. Tentacles of animal and organic matter sway and double-bend, Mobius-like they swell and pull themselves in strange ways. Everything is weird, but everything feels whole. Throbbing spikes protrude through slimy skin, architecturally built, veins like marble. The city made drippy; all possibilities exist.

The viewer is led through Bosch's re-made landscape via new combinations of immaterial and material entities, entangled together and ultimately all part of the same state: a state of flux as yet undefined. This interference affords a superposition of looking at the world, to become a powerful tool to reimagine what we might already know. Only by looking do we allow the world to reveal itself to us; until the moment of looking all things are possible and impossible at the same time.

Superposition
In quantum computing, with information stored in superpositions, some problems can be solved exponentially faster than in classical computing. In Libby’s work, we see this speed in the shifting and metamorphosis of three main areas: sky, architecture / landscape, and water. The sky pulsates and glitches in and out of focus, harmonising colours sparkling. Made of watercolour swatches and HDRI[3]imagery, it breathes and moves in unexpected ways, vectors appearing and disappearing in the distance. The architectural assets in the landscape ebb and spin on their axes, moving simultaneously closer and more distant, fever-dreaming in their relentless morphing. They retreat and then expand, exploding out of their shells and then back, as if on repeat. The landscape is a quantum jungle of creatures, zipping in and out of different dimensions and teleporting through layers of (un)reality. All entities are welcome here, a becoming-with of connectivity, feedback loops, interdependence and vulnerability. The water is iterative and all-encompassing. Its swirling, oily flow recounting experiences of past, present and future. Rippling under the weight of the changing world, we see our pathways reflected and refracted in it, the rhizomatic feelers reaching for something to grasp, like strings of a web blowing in the wind.

The elements created in Libby’s work are ever-evolving in response to all the agents in the environment. Like if time could be sped up and we see our cities changing at a rapid pace too fast to properly decipher. All parts are contingent upon the others.

Through a feminist lens…
Gesturing towards entanglement, hybridity and post-humanity brings with it a feminist perspective of research and outcome. For Karen Barad, the entanglement of matter is inherent to its being. She proposes a theory she calls Agential Realism in which the world is comprised of phenomena inseparable from their intra-actions[4]. For her, “the very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the "Other." The intra-actively emergent "parts" of phenomena are co-constituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin.”[5] Here, materiality is constituted as already entangled by its inborn openness to intra-action. This can be explained visually in early watercolour assemblages in Libby’s research.

The bleeding together of edges, the ebbing and flowing symbolise quantum reality morphing with different “objects” bleeding one into another, meshing and blurring boundaries.

Threads and Entanglements
To return to the threads of possibilities in Libby’s work, and to align the work with a more research-based exploration between Quantum computing and creativity, it’s useful to consider Donna Haraway’s thinking on the game of Cat’s Cradle. This functions both as a way to position the work within a disruptive arena, and also to celebrate the intertwining and endless possibilities afforded when an openness is granted. As a metaphor, the cat’s cradle proposes a seriousness to play, and the collaboration required when redefining or making new patterns in the world. This cat’s cradle is both local and global, distributed and knotted together,[6] but is also about movement and the acceptance of knots, tensions, and flux within the process of making. The cat’s cradle destabilises linear accounts of the research process [7], becoming increasingly complex and interwoven with successive moves, thus becoming an absorbing means of considering insider and outsider participation from both human and non-human actors. For Ent- this takes shape in the quantum remixing of signs and signifiers from the rational world - via Bosch’s lucid celebration of the human where bodies throb with frantic energy, winding themselves around the uncanny, untethered and unknown - into a multi-faceted environment full of hybrid creatures in a pulsating, collapsing rational world, the scattered ruins of which become the (new)plural world.

As a prefix, “Ent” is to begin, to enter. As a keystroke on a keyboard, “Ent” is also to return. But a return to what, to where, or to whom? Does this mixing of human, animal and organic free the human body from its preconceived state into another possible being, or does it canonize the existing hierarchy of the social status by pertaining to dominant and subordinate roles? For Libby, the work places the responsibility of this ordering with the viewer. Since the work has shaken up and remixed different categories through quantum processes, how the viewer 'measures' the resulting 'superposition' - i.e. the meanings they may glean from the work - is the collapse of an existing hierarchy or the making of a new hierarchy. Utilising a kind of performativity with the work, the world within Ent- isn’t merely represented but is iteratively (re)produced, the world ‘becomes’ through inherently material practices of knowing, thinking, measuring, theorising, observing, of intra-acting within and as part of the world. Following Barad in the way that context is built on “specific material configurations”[8], the audience and the work co-constitute the ultimate meaning of it, dynamically reconfiguring the world around them.

References:
[1] which uses "bits" either present as zeros or ones
[2] which uses “quantum bits” present as zero’s, ones or a linear combination of both states
[3] High Dynamic Range Image. “Dynamic range” is the amount of data about the brightness of the image; such data is the much larger amount of the information than the human eye is able to catch.
[4]“Intra-action is a Baradian term used to replace ‘interaction,’ which necessitates pre-established bodies that then participate in action with each other. Intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces (Barad, 2007, p. 141) in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably. Intra-action also acknowledges the impossibility of an absolute separation or classically understood objectivity, in which an apparatus (a technology or medium used to measure a property) or a person using an apparatus are not considered to be part of the process that allows for specifically located ‘outcomes’ or measurement.” Stark, W. (n.d.). intra-action. [online] newmaterialism.eu. Available at: intra-action [Accessed 8 Jan. 2022]
[5] Karen Michelle Barad (2007). Meeting the universe halfway : quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
[6]Donna J Haraway (1994). A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies.
[7] Niamh Moore (2018). A cat’s cradle of feminist and other critical approaches to participatory research. Bristol: University Of Bristol.
[8] Karen Michelle Barad (2007). Meeting the universe halfway : quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

All photos: Libby Heaney, Ent-, Installation view: Schering Stiftung, Berlin, 2022. Photograph: Andrea Rossetti