Ooze Machines

Featuring immersive multi-channel video, new glass and watercolour works and a playable experience, Ooze Machines offers a first glimpse into the non-binary, entangled futures that quantum technologies will bring.

For Heaney, the microscopic quantum world is slime-like and fluid. It doesn't conform to our perceived binaries and fixed boundaries, and from this arises an innate 'oozing' in our bodies, other life forms and machines. In Heaney's own words, human and non-human bodies alike are 'oozey, entangling, dissolving, blurring entities’ within her work.

Slime is a recurring motif throughout the show. As Wedlich writes, there is no living entity we know of that does not have some sort of slime, mucus or viscous gel within its body. However, Heaney also plays with the concept from a personal perspective, exploring the so-called 'slimy' nature of big tech and the oozing across boundaries she's experienced in unwanted personal encounters.

Many of Heaney's works are created and guided by her self-written quantum computing code. Quantum devices function entirely differently than current binary technologies and will one day enable us to see intricate entanglements between matter, energy, space and time. Reflecting this in physical form, her glorious oozing glass sculptures are an unsettling reminder of this interconnectedness, at once both there and not there as they reflect and refract light.

Co-presented with Phoenix Art Space