Libby Heaney | |
---|---|
Alma mater | Imperial College London University of Leeds Central Saint Martins |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | University of Oxford National University of Singapore Royal College of Art |
Thesis | Entanglement of non-interacting Bose gases (2008) |
Website | libbyheaney |
Libby Heaney is a British artist and quantum physicist known for her pioneering work on AI and quantum computing. She works on the impact of future technologies and is widely known to be the first artist to use quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium. [1] Her work has been featured internationally, including in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern and the Science Gallery.
Heaney is from Tamworth, Staffordshire. [2] She lived in Amington, and went to Greenacres Primary School and [3] Woodhouse High School, now called Landau Forte Academy Amington. She took her GCSEs in 1999. [4]
She studied physics at Imperial College London, graduating in 2005 with first class honours. [5] [6] Libby pursued a successful career in quantum physics, completing a PhD thesis on mode entanglement in ultra-cold atomic gases at the University of Leeds, [7] and pursued her own research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford and at the National University of Singapore. In 2008, Heaney was awarded the Institute of Physics Very Early Career Woman in Physics Award (now Jocelyn Bell Burnell Medal and Prize). [8]
In 2013 Heaney returned to the UK and completed a master's degree at the University of the Arts London. She studied arts and science at Central Saint Martins and graduated in 2015. [2] She then became a lecturer at the Royal College of Art, teaching Information Experience Design. [9] In 2016, she created Lady Chatterley's Tinderbot which presented Tinder conversations between real users and AI bots programmed using Lady Chatterley's Lover . Lady Chatterley's Tinderbot was covered by BBC News, TheJournal.ie and the Irish Examiner and was exhibited internationally. [10] [11] [12]
In 2017, Heaney was commissionned by Sky Arts and the Barbican Centre to design Britbot, an internet bot built using artificial intelligence and the citizenship book Life in the UK: a guide for new residents. [13] The book, a manual for the citizenship test, has been described by Heaney as being "largely a white male privileged version of British history and culture". [14] The bot spoke to the public about what it meant to be British and learnt from their responses to become an ever changing, plural version of Britishness. [2] She was awarded an Arts Council England grant to widen participation of the Britbot to social media. [15] Heaney has exhibited Britbot at the Victoria and Albert Museum, at CogX, the Sheffield Documentary Festival the Edinburgh TV festival, and Art Ai in Leicester. [16] [17] [18] [19]
She has been creating with quantum computing since 2019, [20] and has created artworks using quantum computing for Light Art Space (LAS) in Berlin, Somerset House and arebyte in London. [21] [22] [23] Using quantum code, storytelling, and immersive installations and performances, Libby Heaney's works such as Ent- and slimeqore explore and warn against the double-edged potential of quantum computing and its exploitation by private companies. In 2022, Ent- received the Lumen Prize immersive environment award.
In 2022, Libby Heaney was commissioned by Light Art Space to create Ent-, a 360 immersive installation that revisits Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights through quantum. [24] The work uses quantum computing as both a medium and a paradigm through which to conceive human and non-human relations.
Ent- was exhibited at LAS, Ars Electronica, and arebyte gallery in London. [24] [25] [26] The work was also modified to fit a full dome projection at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, projected onto a public facade in Seoul, and turned into a playable version for an exhibition at Nahmad Contemporary in New York. [27]
In 2022, Ent- was a winner in the Art Science Category of the Falling Walls prize and received the Lumen Prize immersive environment award. [28] [29]
The Evolution of Ent-:QX, first displayed at arebyte gallery in London, builds on Ent- and imagines a fictional quantum computing company (QX) that appropriates, parodies and subverts the language of big tech in order to educate the viewer on current profit-oriented uses of quantum computing as well as propose new ways to think about and use the technology. [26]
In 2023, Ent- was acquired and displayed by the 0xCollection, a new media arts institution based in Basel, in their inaugural exhibition in Prague. [30]
Touch is response-ability is an instagram performance and touch screen installation where participants activate animations by flicking through instagram stories. The performance investigates representations of the female body in art history and through computer vision to see how stereotypes are socially constructed and maintained. Images of the body are passed through a quantum algorithm, and as the users interact with them they progressively become fragmented and dissolve beyond recognition.
The work was originally commissioned by Hervisions at LUX in 2020 and performed on the LUX instagram account. It was also exhibited at Etopia Zaragoza in 2021 and at Art SG with Gazelli Art House in 2023. [31] [32]
In Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot, Libby Heaney programmed a bot to engage in conversations on Tinder by using lines from the 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence. The work was first shown as an interactive installation in 2016 at the Dublin Science Gallery, allowing visitors to swipe left or right to navigate through various conversations.
Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot was also exhibited at Sonar+D in Barcelona (2017), the Telefonica Fundacion in Lima (2017), the Lowry in Salford (2018), RMIT gallery in Melbourne (2021), Microwave Festival in Hong Kong (2022) and was shortlisted for the HEK-Basel Net-based art award in 2018. [33] [34] [35] [36] [37]
Her awards include:
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
Louis le BrocquyHRHA was an Irish painter born in Dublin to Albert and Sybil le Brocquy. His work received many accolades in a career that spanned some seventy years of creative practice. In 1956, he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale, winning the Premio Acquisito Internationale with A Family, subsequently included in the historic exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art Brussels, World Fair 1958. The same year he married the Irish painter Anne Madden and left London to work in the French Midi.
Eva Rothschild RA is an Irish artist based in London.
The Electronic Visualisation and the Arts conferences are a series of international interdisciplinary conferences mainly in Europe, but also elsewhere in the world, for people interested in the application of information technology to the cultural and especially the visual arts field, including art galleries and museums.
Chaim "Poju" Zabludowicz is a Finnish-British-Israeli billionaire businessman, art collector and philanthropist.
Neil Shawcross, RHA, HRUA is an artist born in Kearsley, Lancashire, England, and resident in Northern Ireland since 1962. Primarily a portrait painter, his subjects have included Nobel prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, novelist Francis Stuart, former Lord Mayor of Belfast David Cook, footballer Derek Dougan and fellow artists Colin Middleton and Terry Frost. He also paints the figure and still life, taking a self-consciously childlike approach to composition and colour. His work also includes printmaking, and he has designed stained glass for the Ulster Museum and St. Colman's Church, Lambeg, County Antrim. He lives in Hillsborough, County Down.
Sir John Akomfrah is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent, whose "commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films".
Jane McAdam Freud was a British conceptual sculptor working in installation art and digital media. She was the winner of the 2014 European Trebbia Awards for artistic achievement.
Julie Umerle is an American-born abstract painter who lives and works in London.
Gerald David "Gerry" Badger is an English writer and curator of photography, and a photographer.
Michelle Yvonne Simmons is an Australian quantum physicist, recognised for her foundational contributions to the field of atomic electronics.
The Lumen Prize is an international award which celebrates art created with technology, especially digital art.
Nathan Eastwood was born in Barrow-in-Furness, England in 1972. He graduated from Byam Shaw School of Art in 2009.
Sylvia Grace Borda is a Canadian artist working in photography, video and emergent technologies. Borda has worked as a curator, a lecturer, a multimedia framework architect with a specialization in content arrangement (GUI) and production. Born and raised in Vancouver, Borda is currently based in Vancouver, Helsinki, and Scotland. Her work has been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally.
Anita Ruth Zabludowicz is a British contemporary art collector and philanthropist. She is married to Poju Zabludowicz.
Ruth Ewan is a Scottish artist based in Glasgow, who focuses on projects looking at social movements and protests.
Eddie Peake is a British artist. His work includes performance, video, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. His art focuses on "implicit drama within relationships between people", and "how things like desire, sexuality and depression impact on them".
Rachel Ara is a London-based contemporary British conceptual and data artist.
Jake Elwes is a British media artist. Their practice is the exploration of artificial intelligence (AI), queer theory and technical biases. They are known for using AI to create art in mediums such as video, performance and installation. Their work on queering technology addresses issues caused by the normative biases of artificial intelligence.
Miri Segal is a new media artist currently living in Tel Aviv. Segal was born 1965, in Haifa, Israel. Since the late 90s she has created video and media installations, light objects and theatrical pieces. Prior to her career as an artist she studied Mathematics. In 1997, She received a PhD in mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem under the instruction of Prof. Menachem Magidor. In 1998, she studied Art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Segal owes her taste for the mechanisms of perception and the construction of sense-stimulating illusions to her mathematical background, according to art historian Hanna Almeka.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)