Libby Heaney’s Growler (2024) is a glass sculpture that looks anything but. Despite its crystalline surface, it appears as if viscous, gummy and glutinous as it sags and drips down the side of its plinth. You might expect it to be goopy if you happened to prod it. Less glass, it resembles slime.

Slime, for Heaney, represents more than a material metaphor. It evokes a kind of primal ooze. All multicellular life forms depend on some viscous gel, she told me, citing Susanne Wedlich’s The Natural History of Slime. But for the British artist, the goo symbolizes something deeper: the quantum principle known as entanglement, a reactive state that’s exactly as it sounds.

“We think we’re contained and bound, but really, we’re oozing over other people’s boundaries. It’s about our propensity to entangle,” she said over the phone. “Personally, sometimes, I see myself as slimy and overflowing.”

Libby Heaney, Growler (2024). Photo courtesy of Gazelli Art House.

Quantum physics has long been a cornerstone of Heaney’s practice. A scientist turned artist, she leverages quantum technology in a practice foregrounded by quantum thinking and feeling. As expressions of the quantum realm, her forms are fluid and unfixed, venturing narratives and landscapes that are irrational, almost disorienting. To even describe her work, as I’m doing now, diminishes their sheer sweep—they’re meant to elude definition.

It’s this same instability that has increasingly drawn other artists into the quantum orbit in recent years. There, where things are non-binary and ever-shifting, they’ve found new computing tools for art-making as much as an arena for rethinking boundaries. That, as Heaney suggested, is the point: “Consciousness is too limited right now,” she said, “so I think we have to approach quantum through embodiment.”

Just What Is Quantum?

To understand quantum mechanics is to go microscopic, down to atomic scale. Here, matter and light behave in ways that defy classical physics. Particles entangle across distances, tunnel through barriers, exist in states of uncertainty, and occupy two conditions at once. It’s wild. Or, as Tommaso Calarco, physicist and professor at the University of Bologna, put it to me: “Quantum is fun because it makes no sense whatsoever.”

Yet, for all its peculiarity, quantum theory has yielded bedrock notions that undergird fields from quantum chemistry to quantum computing. Among them, there’s superposition, in which particles (or qubits, in the case of quantum computers) could be both “on” and “off” at the same time; and entanglement, wherein particles can share a single state across space. Underlying it all is intrinsic randomness, the uncertainty that comes with measuring a quantum system.

To picture all this is not without difficulty. Quantum phenomena resist the naked eye, revealed only fleetingly in experiments. One way to picture the unseeable? Art, which can be both instructive and illustrative.

“We cannot possibly create a mental image. We cannot create a representation of quantum systems which corresponds to our basic ideas of reality and locality,” Calarco explained. “So, we have to be open to other points of view. Art plays with reality and it is particularly well-positioned to support quantum.”

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In fact, in a recent study, scientists found the easiest way to demonstrate the “exotic vortex patterns” produced by the Quantum Kelvin–Helmholtz instability, which arises in quantum fluids, is to point to the swirly moon in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889).

An earlier research paper in 2024 went further by exploring how quantum could transform existing paintings. The project discretized works by Caravaggio, René Magritte, and Gerhard Richter into square lattices, which were then reoriented by quantum algorithms. Each outcome bore “an element of surprise,” researcher Arianna Crippa, one of the study’s authors, told me.

“By producing direct, visual results—such as images—we create an intuitive and engaging connection to the underlying mechanisms of quantum algorithms,” she added over email. “[The study] highlights that quantum technologies are valuable not only for scientific and practical applications, but also as powerful tools for creative expression.”

A modification of Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1599) by translating the results from quantum computation. Photo courtesy of Crippa et al.

Artists have indeed come calling, their experiments in quantum butting up against the emergence of NFTs and generative artificial intelligence.

Digital artists such as Pindar Van Arman and Kevin Abosch, for example, have injected quantum concepts into their on-chain projects. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s 2021 generative series Quantum Leap nods to quantum physics—and to Quantum, the first-ever NFT artwork, minted in 2014 by Kevin McCoy. In 2022, Entangled Others, the art duo of Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo, debuted Decohering Delineation, an installation that uses quantum computing and A.I. to surface the connections between natural ecosystems and neural networks.

Then there’s Refik Anadol. His Quantum Memories (2020), commissioned by Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria, is a data sculpture that processes 200 million images through quantum randomness and audience interaction. It was created with the assistance of the Google A.I. Quantum team, a partnership that has also come to shape his other immersive installations, including 2021’s Machine Hallucinations — Nature Dreams.

Installation view of Refik Anadol, Quantum Memories (2020) at the NGV Triennial 2020. © Refik Anadol. Photo: Tom Ross.

(And yet more projects are forthcoming: the group show “The Quantum Effect,” exploring paradoxes in the quantum field, is opening September 5 at SMAC San Marco Art Centre in Venice with works by Dara Birnbaum, Isa Genzken, Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, and Jeff Koons. A solo showcase by artist-researcher Ernest Edmonds, centered on his new work Quantum Tango, which draws on the uncertainty of quantum principles, is currently ongoing at Gazelli Art House in London.)

These artists, digital art advisor Fanny Lakoubay told me, “take these dense, abstract systems and make them feel intuitive, visual, even emotional. You’re obviously not going to become a quantum scientist from reading an artwork description, but you might walk away with a key idea, or at least a shift in how you think about reality or technology.”

The Indeterminate Space

Still, it’s not as if scientists lacked ways to describe quantum phenomena. One of the best-known examples comes to us by way of Erwin Schrödinger and his proverbial cat. In 1935, the physicist posed a thought experiment: imagine sealing a feline in a steel box with a vial of poison, which is released only by the decay of a radioactive atom. Until it is observed by opening the box, the atom exists in a state of limbo, both intact and decayed, just as the cat is suspended between life and death. That’s superposition.

That nebulous state might transcend physicality—but not for artist David Young. His conceptual work Superpositions (2025) attempts to create what he called a “tangible artifact of this quantum process.” Each piece here takes the form of a box holding three works, namely a drawing generated from quantum computer data, an A.I. interpretation of that drawing, and the original quantum data that’s been minted as an NFT. All these works have not been observed, not even by their creator, before each being sealed in an envelope.

David Young, Superpositions (2025) (detail). Courtesy of David Young.

“What’s in the envelope is indeterminate until you open it and look at it,” Young told me over a video call. “It plays into this notion that it is the act of the collector or the observer that is creating reality. It’s weird but also empowering.”

The New York-based artist has been engaged with quantum thinking and computing since 2021, stemming from his involvement in the NFT space and his background in machine learning. As a non-expert, he began by sourcing off-the-shelf code, before writing his own programs to process data. Along the way, he said, he’s gained a deeper understanding of quantum physics, while developing “a feeling for what was coming out of the machine.”

David Young, Q 12 (2021), from the series “Quantum Drawings.” Courtesy of David Young.

What emerged were his “Quantum Drawings” (2021–), an ongoing series of artworks created using data generated with quantum computers. They are otherworldly, mysterious creations, permeated with lines and squiggles that spin, ripple, dance, and evolve in unpredictable ways. Similarly uncanny are the outputs of “Q-Stable” (2025), for which Young introduced quantum measurements into Stable Diffusion’s A.I. generation model, producing vivid expressions of an alien logic.

For Young, these quantum projects have yielded unexpected insight into art as much as our lived experience. “There is diversity,” he said. “There is surprise.” With “Q-Stable,” for instance, he found the A.I. model could interpret quantum data more effectively than traditional inputs—hinting, perhaps, that “quantum is more fundamental to our reality than we think it is.”

David Young, A Black Cat With a Red Nose (QS 22) (2025), from the series “Q-Stable.” Courtesy of David Young.

“It’s this notion that through art and aesthetics, we can experiment,” he added. “It helps us imagine alternatives to the kind of reality that we think is so tangible around us.”

A True Randomness

If quantum reality shares anything with classical reality, it is the specter of uncertainty and its twin, randomness. Quantum theory is fundamentally indeterminate, its truths arriving only as probabilities. This randomness is what the Paris-based artist Serge Aa, also known as Horomox, termed “an unfathomably powerful thing, out of this world but at the same time probably its very essence.”

In Serge Aa’s practice, randomness reigns. It’s in his AliceBob (2024–) series of bitmap paintings crafted with datasets drawn from quantum random number generators (QRNG), and in PinkWare (2021), a run of animated paintings based on the outputs of a quantum algorithm in conversation with a biocomputer. These projects are all a part of what the artist describes as “AIproof art,” truly unpredictable, chaotic patterns and data intended to mislead machine learning algorithms.

Serge Aa, Enso Training for Beginners (2024), a temporal fusion of five sources of true randomness and A.I. generative brushstroke. Courtesy of Serge Aa.

“I believe that this kind of ultimate randomness is crucial for creativity overall, especially in our era that relies more and more on predictive algorithms,” he told me.

Serge Aa was early to neural networks, experimenting with them in the 1990s, before discovering true random number generators (TRNG). These systems produce true random numbers, pulled from unpredictable measurements including atmospheric noise and quantum phenomena, unlike the pseudo-randomness of computer programs. His use of TRNGs, including HotBits, to create digital paintings evolved into his experiments with QRNGs in the 2000s. The resulting works—bold tapestries of lava flows, speckles, and streaks in charged hues—escape interpretation.

Serge Aa, Radio Lava X18 (1997), digital work using HotBits and LavaRand QRNGs. Courtesy of Serge Aa.

The artist’s engagement with quantum technologies preceded the few years he spent in a Tibetan center, where he trained in Buddhist philosophy. The experiences mingled. He located similarities between quantum and meditative practices, among them “indeterminacy and instability, relative and ultimate truths, the observer effect and the illusory subjective nature of reality.”

Over email, Serge Aa reflected on the ritual of the Sand Mandala, wherein a painstakingly created sand design is swiftly undone. He has mirrored the act in his own digital paintings, producing them with QRNG outputs and then dissolving them with the Smudge tool in Photoshop. Where the Mandala tradition emphasized chaos in order, his pieces sought to “demolish the pure quantum chaos with the human gesture,” he said. It’s a principle he’s carried throughout his practice.

Serge Aa, Quantum NamKha 1 (2025), a quantum tribute to the traditional Tibetan object. Courtesy of Serge Aa.

“I like the idea of letting go—of the abandonment of agency and the directness and immediacy of experience it can lead to,” he explained. “It’s important sometimes to ditch our own way of thinking, control, and ego. That’s probably the only way to disrupt dualistic thinking and access other levels of creativity. What can be a more efficient disruptor than non-deterministic true randomness?”

The Amorphous Body

In 2024, Heaney landed a quantum cyborg in London’s Regent Park for Frieze Sculpture. Ent- (non-earthly delights) is part biomorphic blue blob and part metallic chamber that recalls the body of a quantum computer. It’s a strange structure to encounter in the wild, as if an entity from a quantum world had become entangled with our own. Fittingly, the form appears totally slimy.

Libby Heaney, Ent- (non-earthly delights) (2024). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House & Libby Heaney. Photo: Deniz Guzel.

The creature emerges from Heaney’s 2022 piece, Ent-, a five-channel installation that immerses its viewer in a reimagining of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510). Here, the garden has been repopulated with unearthly beings, brought to life by the artist’s bespoke quantum code, which has manipulated and animated her watercolor paintings. The landscape is never still, constantly deforming and reforming. It’s all fluid, intentionally so.

“Since the Enlightenment, everything is quantified and sold back to us,” she said. “Quantum is a way of deconstructing all of this.”

A big part of that, for Heaney, lies in entanglement, which runs through her body of work like a thread. It’s in her video installations such as slimeQore (2022) and slimeQrawl (2023), stitched together and composed with data from IBM’s five-qubit systems, resulting in a peculiar blur that hints at the intricacies of quantum entanglement. It’s also in her watercolor paintings, where the pigment, applied on wet paper, heeds its own logic, leaving behind wave forms and bleeding into other colored blots. Watercolor, to Heaney, is quantum.

“Matter is like a field of potentiality and shape-shifting fluid, depending on how it interacts or tangles with other things,” she said.

Installation view of Libby Heaney, Ent- (2022) at Schering Stiftung, Berlin. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.

She is currently prepping for “Shadowscapes,” a forthcoming show of new works for which she is turning quantum onto another master painter, JMW Turner. Opening at London’s Orleans House Gallery on October 9, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth, it centers on Heaney’s reinterpretation of three lesser-known Turner works, which she handpicked for their depiction of “amorphous bodies,” where “the human is entangled with nature.” She will unveil a sound installation, a series of 2D works, and an interactive projection built with computer game software and quantum computing.

With these latest commissions, she hopes to reframe Turner’s canvases as “contemporary psychological landscapes.” They hold light but shadow as well, with both coexisting without resolution. That boundless effect is what Heaney called “quantum feeling”—the same sensation her practice continually aims to evoke—of experiencing an ocean of emotions, vast, layered, and paradoxical, in concert.

“One example of quantum feeling is having an experience where you could be drastically sad, holding grief, but also appreciating the beauty of the world,” she explained. “It’s sensing or experiencing the world in all of its complexity and messiness and loneliness that’s within us and outside of us. It’s an entanglement between everything.”

Libby Heaney, Heartbreak and Magic (2024), interactive VR experience on Unity application. Courtesy of Gazelli Art House.

Everything, Everywhere

Now, let’s get speculative. Quantum concepts such as superposition and entanglement are real and measured, central to the field—but they also open portals to imagination. A quantum system can hold many outcomes in superposition, but what if that radiates outwards into parallel realities? And what if, at each fork, our universe branches into countless others?

Such is the conjecture of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which has helped to popularize the modern idea of the multiverse. The notion has stoked the realm of science fiction: it shows up in animated series Rick and Morty, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (from the TV series Loki to the second Dr Strange movie), the DC Multiverse run of comics, and the Interworld fantasy novels by Neil Gaiman and friends.

Most strikingly, the Oscar-winning film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022) used the idea of multiverse-jumping as a lens to interrogate connection and selfhood. “Everything is just a random rearrangement of particles in a vibrating superposition,” a character in the movie tells us. “You’re everywhere.”

David Young, Q 453 (2022), from the series “Quantum Drawings: Multiverse Maps.” Courtesy of David Young.

Artists, of course, are not immune to the lure of the multiverse. Young explores this speculation in “Multiverse Maps” (2022–), visualizations of quantum data drawn from entangled quantum bits, which are described in theory as being linked through space-time wormholes. With “Q-Stable, “he ventures further, suggesting that an A.I. fed with quantum data could be glimpsing “unfamiliar realities.”

“Maybe these machines are running because they’re in collaboration with other instances of them in other universes,” he said. “Maybe when they make choices, there’s the notion of the universe splitting.”

Anadol’s Quantum Memories posits a similar rent in the fabric of the universe. In a video ahead of the work’s debut at the 2020 NGV Triennial, he mused: “If A.I. can look at this complexity [of quantum mechanics], perhaps it can see an alternate reality and the speculation here is what that alternate reality will be.”

And might an alternate reality be ready to receive mail from our universe? That’s the conceit of Serge Aa’s PostPost (2024) project. A thought experiment turned participatory piece, it invites participants to inscribe postcards with short messages, which are paired with manipulated QRNG outputs. These are conveyed via the artist’s so-called Many-Worlds Private Network as speculative transmissions to a parallel universe. The artist, with sly understatement, called it “a kind of post office.”

Serge Aa, PostPost Card 3 (2024). Courtesy of Serge Aa.

Our Quantum Tomorrow

Back in our universe, where is quantum art taking us?

Lakoubay, who has avidly followed the quantum art field as it has emerged, believes the form currently still occupies a niche. She sees real promise in its trajectory, though. “It might stay under the radar for now, but as quantum computing becomes more present in mainstream conversations and commercial use, I hope quantum art emerges as a space to reflect,” she said. “If there’s one technology that pushes us to embrace the unknown, it’s quantum.”

The Berlin-based LAS Art Foundation is far more bullish. The organization—which commissioned Heaney’s Ent- and Laure Prouvost’s recent quantum art installation We Felt a Star Dying (2025)—is in the midst of its three-year Quantum Sensing Initiative, which explores the rise of quantum technologies. As part of the program, it is lining up two more large-scale exhibitions, and a quantum-focused symposium featuring artists and physicists on October 25.

Installation view of Laure Prouvost, We Felt a Star Dying (2025) at Kraftwerk Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by OGR Torino. © 2025 Laure Prouvost. Photo: Andrea Rossetti © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025.

“Quantum is changing the way we understand and should see the world,” Bettina Kames, LAS’s CEO, told me over a video call. “It’s a paradigm shift that’s so profound, it requires you to embrace it 360-degrees. What does this mean for humanity? What does this mean for art?”

Kames described the foundation’s efforts as educational, in making “these very complex, hard-to-understand topics accessible for a large audience.”

Quantum does make for a heady brew. It offers possibilities, but tensions too. Big Tech, as Heaney warns in her QX series, is ready to exploit and commodify it; the field itself is advancing toward milestones like quantum supremacy, with the potential to weaken today’s cryptography.

But the artists I spoke to stressed that their work should be experienced visually and instinctively, no advanced technical knowledge required. Young, for one, sees his practice functioning as a “Trojan horse” for quantum. “It’s more an experiential approach,” he explained. “I hope that is a way to empower people to develop their own intuitions, perspectives, and feelings of what the technology is.”

David Young, Q 303 (2022), from the series “Quantum Drawings: Multiverse Maps.” Courtesy of David Young.

Serge Aa reckons “the best way to appreciate my works is to view them as they are,” without explanations, expectations, or even descriptions. “Nobody knows where the magic starts and when it ends,” he added. It’s a sentiment echoed by Heaney, who refrains from over-explaining the technicalities of her art: “It ruins the magic.”

Their shared invoking of magic is perhaps no accident—apt for a form that gestures toward the intangible and the unknowable. In a world of binaries and prescriptions, quantum art insists on an irreducible strangeness. It’s a radical claim for wonder.

“If it’s truly quantum,” said Heaney, “it shouldn’t look like anything else we’ve seen before.”