Libby Heaney uses quantum computing to create immersive and participatory installations. Life in the Multiverse, commissioned for Sainsbury Centre’s What is the Meaning of Life? season, includes a two-part digital installation and a new series of paintings.

Within Life in the Multiverse, Heaney explores the meaning of life through both personal and universal perspectives. For the latter, Heaney engages with Sainsbury Centre’s living collection through a series of physical encounters, experiencing works through bodily sensations including touch, smell and sight, as well as dreams. Visitors are invited to physically enter a sculptural work and become part of Heaney’s digital multiverses.

Heaney layers diverse experiences both real and imagined, to explore ideas around interconnectedness. Combining multiple images, movements and sounds through quantum coding, Heaney invites us, as participants, to feel these dream-like, cosmic, and non-linear universes. For Heaney, the self, when viewed through a quantum lens, is not an individual identity, but one interconnected with other humans and non-humans across a multiverse. The multiverse – from the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics – suggests all entities could be reconfiguring in various ways across spaces and times.

This digital installation is accompanied by a new series of paintings. For Heaney, working with watercolour reminds her of working with quantum particles, with the paint flooding each surface, spreading out, and creating puddles that ‘entangle’ together, in much the same way as the images we encounter within Heaney’s digital multiverses.

Life in the Multiverse emerges as a sensuous ebb and flow of images that wash in, around, and over us.