About
I’m an animation filmmaker and artist creating large scale digital video projections through to intimate digital electronic objects that explore notions of artificial and everyday life, shared experience, and control (or lack thereof). At its core, my current work builds on my early career in commercial animation, videogame production and AI research. I make custom videogame-like experiences, what I also refer to as live simulations, and free them from the necessity to function as interactive play experiences. Unburdened by the joystick, videogame systems can become a new animated art form. My goal is to use the untapped power of this new media to defend and strengthen the freedom to imagine. As Diane di Prima’s poem ‘Rant’ refrains “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it.”
My work avoids the hierarchical one-way broadcast of ideas and invites the most powerful forms of interaction, interpretation and dialog. I began to explore how I could use my technical skills to ask questions rather than answer them in 2014 when I enrolled on the MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths. Here, I developed the beginnings of my min-max language where minimalist geometric forms infused with simple behaviours are arranged to produce complex, dynamic movement. I found, like psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel did in the 1940s, that reduced forms in motion could elicit powerful internal stories within the viewer. And also like scientists Reeves and Nass, I found that people can relate to these stories in profoundly personal and imaginative ways.
My digital installation, ‘Wanton Boys’, first employed this language. It has been shown internationally at festivals, galleries and fairs including the Eden Project Cornwall, London Illustration Fair, the Old Waterworks, Southend, and Digital Graffiti, Florida. As it travelled to each destination, I became more sensitive to its surroundings. At the Eden Project it showed with precisely engineered artworks dealing with AI. I responded by constructing a large chipboard architecture to give it a makeshift aesthetic. At the Digital Graffiti festival in Florida, I co-designed the work’s display with local residents, highlighting their favourite facets of a local bridge at night. This installation won the grand prize and I have been invited for a residency there in 2022.
I have developed the min-max language subsequently through various other shows and projects. In 2018, I presented my first solo show, ‘IN THE SHADE BUT NOT THE SHADOW’, at SLEEPCENTER, NYC. Here I explored how we can use technology to withdraw and reflect. In 2020, this evolved into the concept I call 'good traps' at ‘because because because because because’ my first solo commercial show at Sim Smith, London. Other projects have shown at a number of venues including The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Etopia, Spain, and Ars Electronica, Austria.
My work comes alive when it creates an experience and an encounter for groups of people. And while it is my goal to infuse the work with universal qualities and make it as open as possible, it is strengthened by engaging with its specific contexts. In his book How Music Works musician David Byrne describes how music evolves to suit the different spaces that people inhabit. For example, the percussive sound of drums survives on the windy open plains where other sounds do not and Gregorian chant echoes hauntingly through cavernous echoey cathedrals. Learning from this, I’m conscious of my works’ contexts, and how I can use them to not only amplify the works’ innate power but symbiotically benefit the spaces and communities within which it exists. Through my work I draw attention to overlooked or hidden aspects of a place, inviting my audiences into dialogue not only with the work, but the spaces they inhabit.
To deepen my understanding of community art, I became a trustee of Deptford X, a local to South East London contemporary art festival. Over the course of 4 years as an artist-trustee, I both exhibited work and helped steer the festival, emphasising the importance of public and fringe programming alongside curated programming. At the same time, Deptford X clarified for me my next steps as an artist with greater importance placed on site-specific public-engagement and better processes and technology to best showcase my work. Working in an area of deprivation like Deptford, I also learned the importance of bringing my work to people rather than expecting them to seek it out for themselves. Subsequently, I have made work for other festivals such as Dadaepo X in Busan, Korea, SE London Festival, Leith Late in Edinburgh, and KUNSTkabine in Baar, Switzerland. At each, I collaborated with and showed within non-traditional art venues like charity shops, parks, online streaming services, and daycares to develop and display my work. These experiences provided me with unique perspectives on their respective communities, but also fresh insights on how my work can have significant social impacts.
The current distribution of art often does not take into account a broader audience in general. I passionately believe that art should not talk down to or patronise the public. My work in the area of digital video projection over the past 6 years has demonstrated that this medium is uniquely positioned to give broader audiences access to art without the bureaucratic, logistical and financial problems associated with traditional public art forms like conventional sculpture. Projection is sustainable, reactive and agile, responsive to the demands of contemporary life and international in scope. Beyond the scope of my own work, we can consider the work of Led by Donkeys, Krzysztof Wodiczko and others in their use of projection for its immediate impact and scale.
The audience for contemporary art is changing. Covid has forever changed its landscape–it has simultaneously become more of an online and public phenomena. Further, social movements across the world have highlighted many gross inequalities, including peoples’ access to art. We have a renewed interest in public space because it is not only more covid compliant than institutional spaces but it is less burdened with hidden political agendas. The experience of the past year has made me passionate about directing my practice toward audience experiences that are located within communities and public space–not just traditional art contexts. My work strives to be new, surprising, stimulating, thought-provoking and generous and I believe that everyone should be able to experience it.