This work was commissioned by Hervisions at LUX as part of their OUT of TOUCH programme during lockdown 2020. touch is response-ability is one of the first works made with quantum computing.

touch is response-ability is a site-specific interactive animation, where the participants’ touch controls the movement of the frames. The title of the work comes from Barad's essay On Touching - the Inhuman That Therefore I Am. Using Instagram stories as a medium, the work existed as two durational performances that invited viewers to activate the animation through the action of touch. Each performance lasted for 24 hours on LUX's Instagram.

The first and last stills in each performance were created by Heaney based on extensive research into representations of the body in computer vision and artificial intelligence, finding parallels in art history, highlighting the biases in which bodies are seen and neglected in both. The subsequent frames in the animation were generated by passing the initial frame through IBM's quantum computing systems, which through a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, fragments and inverts the image.

In every frame, the body from the initial image always exists but the quantum computing algorithm enables us to see it from alternative, multiple perspectives – boundary-less and form-less. The stills are watched with a computer vision algorithm – Open-Pose – which loses track of the body as it becomes "quantum" and is released from its encoded shackles.