RESIDENCY EXHIBITION SERIES
JULY 31 – AUG 31, 2026
Xinyi Zhang
Quantum Butterfly Field
“Quantum Butterfly Field” features new live generative artwork by Artist-in-Residence Xinyi Zhang. The exhibition includes an interactive website that intersects quantum computing concepts with indigenous epistemologies. The animated forms in this screen-based work explore possibilities for repair and resilience found in interconnectedness.
“…quantum resilience resonates beautifully with the Native Hawaiian concept of lōkahi (unity and wholeness), where individual wellbeing is maintained through the integrity of our relationships within a web of the interconnected whole…”
— Xinyi Zhang
Xinyi Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist and technologist exploring the intersections of nature, spirituality, and computational media. Drawing upon diverse knowledge systems and emerging technologies, Zhang creates works that move between the organic and the algorithmic, the human and the other-than-human, the ethereal and the material — always in search of what lies at the threshold, where perceptual boundaries soften and other forms of agency begin to speak. Her practice engages with art as relational and restorative force in which the technical becomes a vehicle for ecological and spiritual attunement. Zhang holds computer science degrees from MIT and the University of British Columbia. She has exhibited her work in contemporary spaces and community-based venues throughout the U.S. and Europe.
About the Work
"Quantum Butterfly Field" is an interactive artwork bridging quantum computing concepts with indigenous epistemologies to explore repair and resilience in an interconnected world. Participants engage with a dynamically evolving web of generative "quantum butterflies", each representing a qubit entangled through a live scrambling circuit running on IonQ hardware. As participants move through the field, their presence perturbs a single qubit, causing local “damage”. Yet, through the quantum no-butterfly effect (Sinitsyn & Yan, 2020), information distributed across the entangled system can be reconstructed, and the visual field gradually “heals” around the participant, rendering visible how entanglement enables resilience to local disruption. This quantum “resilience” resonates beautifully with the Native Hawaiian concept of lōkahi (unity and wholeness), where individual wellbeing is maintained through the integrity of our relationships within a web of the interconnected whole.