Joan Heemskerk part of group show at Copenhagen Contemporary
Joan Heemskerk part of group show at Copenhagen Contemporary
Joan Heemskerk is part of group exhibition Soft Robots at Ccopenhagen Contemporary
→ 20 June - 31 December, 2025
The relationship between humans and technology is one of the great dramas of the modern age, often featuring the machine as either a saviour overcoming human limitations or a monster threatening our existence. Artists today are developing new and more complex visions showing humans, technology, animals and plants operating in symbiotic constellations. Exploring this perspective, the Soft Robots exhibition features Danish and international artists presenting their visions for a new synthetic biology and its potential connections to spirituality.
Read more detailed information on the exhibition here.
Two works by Joan Heemskerk will be on display.
1. NO MATTER (2024)
During her residency at CERN in Switzerland, the artist encountered scientists searching for the smallest unknown particles of the universe. This search takes place from deep underground in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to the International Space Station (ISS). Recordings on film and terabytes of data are analyzed to prove our hypotheses about matter and anti-matter.
In this video work, the artist applies an atypical method to the recordings to work out possible connections between the particles, the Hough line transform. A feature extraction technique used in image analysis, computer vision, and digital image processing. This is combined with lines of text from interviews the artist conducted with several scientists, where text-to-speak AI is used to find ... no matter.
2. entangled binary network (Hello, world!) (2024):
This installation can be seen as a visualization of a quantum internet network between 2 entangled fields: Alice and Bob saying “Hello, world!” in [non] binary.
The interaction of ultraviolet or infrared light with hydrogen matter is used in the lab to make quantum entangled networks and will be the building block for scalable quantum computers. The hydrogen atom, consisting only of a proton and an electron, together with the spectrum of light produced from it or absorbed by it, has been used as a symbol for explaining binary computations to future humans, AI or alien life forms in our galaxy.
Publication date: 18 Jun '25