QX Extended Advertisement, 2022

«Are you ready?» asks Heaney as soon as we enter the exhibition, surrounded by her works, QX Extended Advertisement and QX Product Launch Video. Are we ready for a quantum world? And whom do we want to entrust with shaping this world? The ambivalence of the incredible potential and inherent dangers of using this powerful technology is addressed in both videos. To this end, Heaney created a fictitious quantum computer company called «QX» (Quantum eXperience), which, like other companies in the race for the ongoing quantum computing technological revolution, advertises its expertise as well as the new technology’s promise of salvation. Phrases like «Reach Your Full Potential» or «We Are Accelerating The Future Of Quantum Together» can be read on the screens; many of these sentences are taken from the marketing slogans of existing quantum computing companies like Google, IBM, or numerous other startups in the industry. This is overlayed with Heaney's own work, Ent-and is interspersed with animations of quantum computers with impressive golden casings, ironically parodying typical commercial aesthetics and marketing strategies of Big Tech companies. The fiction of perpetual technological advancement is quickly disrupted as subtle image distortions and glitches appear, the quantum computer casings become covered in slime, and the voiceover becomes increasingly slow and buggy. In both works, Heaney interweaves fact and fiction, inviting us to reflect on the future of quantum computing and its socio-political significance. In parallel, the artist visualises the principles of a quantum reality beyond the binary in favour of fluidity and plurality, with all its indeterminacies and categories in flux.